


Clashildr One Shots

by doctor_funkinstein



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 40
Words: 33,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctor_funkinstein/pseuds/doctor_funkinstein
Summary: A collection of one shots of Clara and Ashildr, zipping around time in their stolen TARDIS and very much in love.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Stonewall

"Hey, Ashildr?" Clara called. She sat with her legs crumpled under her on a stool in the diner that was outside of the console room of the TARDIS, gazing out into the depths space as they sat, parked, in a blissful corner of nowhere.  
"Yesh?" Ashildr replied, popping up like a weasel out of a hole from behind the counter, some random wiring in between her teeth.  
"Um, watcha got there?" Clara asked hesitantly.  
"Oh." Ashildr took the cabling out of her mouth. "Sorry, the fridge went. I was trying to fix it, but the fifties were so long ago, I can't remember... I did a stint as an electrician. I didn't expect to have to keep pretending to be a man for as long as I did. Everything alright?"  
"Yeah, I was just thinking is all."  
"Dangerous habit in the dark and cold." Ashildr's eyes went straight past Clara and out into the milky black that streaked between the star systems.  
"Ever been to Pride?"  
"Almost every year since 1998, I think. It's all in my dairies..."  
Clara raised an eyebrow at her. "Ever wanted to throw some bricks?"  
Ashildr frowned, standing up and leaning against the bar on her elbows. She chuckled. "I'm not as young as I look."  
Clara was already on her feet, headed towards the console room, not listening to her girlfriend's objections. What's the point in having a time machine if you can't check out Stonewall?  
Clara danced around the console, flicking switches and pulling levers as if she knew what she was doing, clocking Ashildr leaning against the doorframe on the line between fantasy any reality. One side of it was your usual diner, the kind you'd find in the depths of Nevada or even under a flyover in DC: so average the most intelligent machine in the world had chosen it as a camouflage, and on the other sat the whole of time and space - all that ever was or is yet to be. To Clara, Ashildr's stance was stangly ironic, as she often found herself thinking of the immortal as walking that line between real and almost real. Your average girl with just a little bit of alien and a whole lot of beauty mixing in a being older than most civilizations to create what could only be described of as her.  
Clara continued to flip switches and pull levers, even resorting to caressing the console, but the TARDIS wouldn't land.  
"She's being argumentative," Clara muttered, slightly apologetic.  
Ashildr's hands covered Clara's, bringing them to rest over the console. "Thought so."  
Ashildr being so close to Clara still have her butterflies, despite however many years it'd been. "Let's check my dairies. But- don't be mad if it's a negative outcome."  
Before she could object, the Viking grabbed the Londoner's hand and pulled her through the twisting channels of the TARDIS until they reached the library. Ashildr pulled a thick tome off of a shelf and dumped it in Clara's arms.  
"You sure do have a lot to say, don't you?" Clara joked to hide the fact she was about to drop the book right on their toes.  
"That's 1969, open it to June," Ashildr instructed.  
"'I didn't expect it to happen, not like this; by now I have lived long enough to know that acceptance must be required for a functioning society, having seen so many fail in my years - I always knew that this day would come, but not arching through the sky-' boy's eye, love, I teach Shakespeare and this is a long sentence. Bloody hell, mate, did they not teach you full stops? Anyway- 'but not arching through the sky on a brick.' The next sentence is even longer so I shall spare us both the mercy of that." Clara chewed her lip and sat back on her heels. "The TARDIS wont land because you're already there. That sucks."  
"Doesn't the TARDIS buck and sway and throw you around when you try to land somewhere she doesn't want you to be?"  
"We don't leave the brakes on."


	2. 2013

Ashildr was a vision of beauty, sat in the sun with her hair falling around her face and her eyes twinkling softly.   
Clara couldn't take her eyes off her. They sat across from each other in a café in Rome somewhere, bathing in the Earth sunlight thankfully after being away from it for a while. The rest of the square bustled with Italians and tourists equally, some biking over the stone paths and others squinting through cameras.   
Clara sipped her coffee, paying no attention to anyone other than the woman in front of her.   
"Clara, it's 2013, put the heart eyes away," she whispered, suppressing a smile. Ashildr's cheeks turned a deep shade of pink.  
"Can you still get sunburnt? You're going a bit red, just there," Clara replied, leaning across the table and brushing the back of her fingers across her partner's cheek. Ashildr's blush deepened as she swatted Clara's hand away - Ashildr was very shy out in public, but Clara knew that as soon as they were alone she'd have the shagging of a lifetime.   
Clara chuckled, forever a tease, when two other women caught her eye. One was slightly taller than her, with ginger hair coming down to just below her shoulders, and the other was taller still, aided by a head of thick curls worn as an afro. They were holding hands. It seemed to Clara that they had a sort of perception filter on them, as nobody in the square seemed to notice how the ginger seemed to be composed of water and her partner of glass.  
"Hey," Clara muttered, hiding her face behind her mug but nodding towards the couple, "space lesbians. Like us."  
"We're not space lesbians," Ashildr scorned, swiveling in her chair to try and see the couple. They let their hands slip out of each others. "We should say hi, right?"  
"We've scared them now. If we go up to them they'll think we're gonna tell them they're going to hell."  
Clara stood up and began walking towards the two, pulling Ashildr along by the hand.   
"Clara," she began to object, "we really-"  
Clara simply shushed her and continued up to the two other women.   
"Sorry, hi, Clara," she said to them. "We're not homophobic or anything, my girlfriend here, Ashildr, she's gay." Clara motioned to Ashildr.   
"Bill," the taller woman said. She motioned to her girl, taking her hand again. "This is Heather. We were just... Passing through."   
Heather crossed her free arm over her body and tucked her fingers around Bill's elbow.  
"All of time and space, stopping in Italy has to be kept short. We had the same idea."  
"How did you know that?" Heather asked.  
"Come on. We'll show you our TARDIS."


	3. There's Only One Bed

New York, 1987. There was something about Earth none of the humans could get enough of. For economic reasons, when staying in posh hotels, they only ever rented the minimum number of rooms - and two couples means a two room minimum. So that was what they rented - but the lads responsible for delivering luggage always managed to get it wrong and lumped Bill's luggage in with Ashildr's. When Heather walked into her room after a long day of sampling the true 80's, looking forward to collapsing in a heap with her girlfriend, only to find Clara's bags instead, she was too amused to be irritated.   
"I'll let you use the bathroom first," she chuckled as Clara appeared in the doorway.   
She sat on the edge of the double bed, smoothing the sheets down with one hand. High quality, good thread count - she'd just have to watch the whole water thing. Bill didn't mind sleeping next to a puddle, she'd gotten used to it: Clara, on the other hand, didn't have the same kind of relationship with Heather so she'd probably have to try and stay pretty solid.   
"We could just... Move the bags around, if you want," Clara suggested, climbing into the bed.   
"I'm cool if you are. And shattered."  
Heather was significantly less human than Clara, so didn't have to bother with the whole teeth brushing thing, just climbed into bed next to her and flipped the switch.  
"Sleep well."


	4. That is a C h a i r

Yorkshire, 1912 - a city unaware of its future and still bustling with hopeful people going about their days trying to make a buck or two, whatever way they can, legally or... Otherwise.   
It was in such times that Ashildr and her beloved had to be careful: two women running around was still, unjustly, unusual. After their recent escapades, staying in the norm was crucial. Unnoticed was best. It was for this reasoning, however much they disagreed, that Ashildr and Clara took precautions.   
Of course, the Viking was alive in these times, and had dressed as a man to live the easiest life plausible. She returned to such measures when visiting with Clara, donning a suit and top hat and wandering the streets with her most manly gate. Although she would never admit it, Clara enjoyed not being the only top in Ashildr's vicinity. They tried to stay out of trouble, enjoying a sort of retirement, and did not actively go looking for trouble and the owner of the only other TARDIS did, purely for the reasoning that "lesbians in a diner" didn't have the same ring in legends as "madman in a box" did.  
Only for a moment, Clara let go of Ashildr's arm, running off somewhere to explore some sort of dark alley she thought would lead somewhere interesting. Ashildr turned away for only a moment, her attention caught by some street vender trying to sell her some bauble, but when she turned back, Clara was gone.  
"Clara?" She glanced around but the woman was nowhere to be seen.

Ashildr grabbed the man by the lapels and shoved him against the brick wall of the alley, his wares clattering from his hand. Her fingers throbbed, a dull ache pressing through her knuckles, but the pain was masked by the numb feeling of loss in her heart and the fear that gripped her stomach.  
"Listen," she growled, bringing her face up close to the man's. "That woman means a lot to me, so God help you if you're withholding anything."  
The man went to respond, but Ashildr twisted her wrists and forced him harder against the wall. His neck became pushed against the bricks at what looked like a painful angle. Good.  
"Don't lie. That's a really bad idea."  
The man licked his lips, bringing a breath through his frankly disgusting teeth. "Wa' ta'en, innit," he rasped. "Yer ain't neva gon see yer missus agen."  
Anger flushed through Ashildr like a wave crashing against the rocks. As the sea pulled away from the sand, all that and we left in its place was dread. "The hell do you mean, 'taken'?"   
"Sailors, innit, sir." He twisted his head to the side to spit, narrowly missing Ashildr's shoe. "They gon sell 'er if she's ugly, keep her if she ain't." He laughed. "Yer not from 'round here, ah yer? She'll either be given to the highes' bidd'r, 'r be ta'en to seh, case the men miss their wi'es."  
The dread was replaced by disgust. The anger was replaced with a sense of purpose. Ashildr needed to get to Clara and fast.  
"Where?" she whispered.  
The man laughed again. "As if I' tell sum 'n'itled brat like yer-"  
Ashildr held a knee threateningly by his groin. "Where?" she repeated, walking the line between desperation and determination.   
"Docks."  
She let go of him and his back immediately slouched again. Get hit the floor with a slight crunch. Ashildr turned to go. She tried to be finished with him, to leave him alone, but when he started laughing again she was overcome. Red descended her vision, clouded her judgements, boiled her blood; she turned around again to face the man, only aware of what she was doing when she felt her knuckled crack against his face. 

Before Ashildr could embark on her heroic quest of saving her Clara, she first had to find her. People were keen to talk to her, it being an open time socially, but it was never about anything important. Men would tip their bowler hats with their wives hanging off their arms, lacy dresses leaving little more than an elbow on display as they melted into silk gloves.   
"Weather is finally brightening up," they would say, chuckling.  
"Indeed." Ashildr choked on the wasted time. Clara could be on a ship by now. "I don't say, do you fine people know where the docks are?" She would stuff her hands into her bracers and nod in return. Many were unhelpful, but if she stopped her frantic searching and spoke to people she may end up losing more time.  
Time, time, time. The word ran amock in her head.   
Perhaps that was a downside to the love she felt for Clara. Ashildr had spent so long under the name Me, the only constant in her life being herself, but the ticks of the clock melted together with Clara so much neither one remembered how long they'd been travelling together. She'd forgotten what it felt like to be alone - let her wall down again. And maybe that was a mistake. Clara was going to die, Clara should be dead, they both knew: in a way, to Ashildr, she already was. She was on Trap Street when Clara died. She saw it. The memories were etched in her mind more firmly than any other, surviving the years instead of burning out. And now she was going to lose her. But it didn't feel like that when they ran together. The Viking and the English teacher, running around the universe hand in hand - never to be pulled apart, not even by time. Who wouldn't loosen up? Let them in? This was a mistake. All Ashildr would ever get herself was hurt.  
"Just turn left here, then keep heading straight until you can see the water. Ask someone there for more specific directions as to where you need to be," the woman replied softly, as if not wanting to disturb Ashildr too much. Or maybe that's how women were supposed to be. Ashildr couldn't remember.   
"Thank you, m'lady. I should be off."  
And she ran.

She didn't have time to talk. She didn't have time to threaten. She didn't have time to shake trees and bust into the sales. She had to pose as a buyer.   
The very force it took Ashildr to mix with the men who would be buying and selling women was almost too great an ask: bile rose in her throat and anger in her chest.   
A man came up to her and slapped a hand on her shoulder. His hand was wrinkled, the skin of a smoker and delinquent, and his fingernails dirty.   
"Aren't you too young to be here, my son?" he asked through his five teeth.  
Ashildr laughed. "No, sir. I'm a lot older than I look." A lot older than I can remember, she added in her head, but I doubt you'll make it to see tomorrow when I'm-  
Ashildr found herself in a group of men, all clamouring and drunk and surrounding her as if she were a child. She gritted her teeth.  
"Did you see the new one they hauled off the street just this morning?" one man asked.   
A second man spat at the ground. "The pretty one?"  
The men laughed outrageously. Ashildr didn't join in.   
"Come on, son, be merry!" one asshat called. "Or have you not had the chance to look at the livestock yet?"  
Ashildr clenched her fists in her pockets. He was gonna be out first. She forced a laugh, using the sick cover of their animalistic dehumanisation of women and incredulous misogyny to count how many there were.   
Wrinkled-Skin, who'd slapped her on the shoulder, stood next to Livestock; the group seemed to be headed by Beard - the one who'd referred to Clara as "the pretty one" - and his mate Kidnapper, who'd spoken of taking her right off the street. The fifth and final man stood silent and stoic to the side, his beady eyes bulging out of their sockets as they scanned the water.   
"The ships are coming in," Beady said suddenly. "Move inside, sailors. Boy." He gave Ashildr the side eye.   
The warehouse was mostly empty and smelled rancid - the smell of the sweat of vacuous men's sweat mingling with iron (Ashildr refused to let it register as blood) and dead mice. The men allowed Ashildr to stand ahead of them as to "have a better view". She had a view alright.   
Like it was some sick form of theatre, the only furnishing in the room was a crude stage of arranged crates. One by one, bedraggled women were pushed onto them and the men started to clamour.   
When Clara was shoved on to the stage, Ashildr had to swallow every emotion that threatened to bubble over and have her see red.  
"That your type, eh, son?" one of the men asked.  
"Indeed." Mistake her anger for arousal. Men.  
She was done. She'd seen Clara was okay. Time to get her back.  
Not paying attention to who they were, Ashildr took out the men one by one. The shriveling man next to her took an elbow to the groin, his screams alerting those around him what was going on. She was just getting started. Of those who ran towards her, none got back up again. There was the man who took a knee to the stomach, letting the short Viking to get a good reach on his head, which she promptly slammed into a crate. She cracked her neck. Stared at the three remaining men. All others had scampered. One pulled a knife out of his jacket.   
Spice it up a bit.  
Ashildr blocked the knife, wrist to wrist, sending it flying across the floor. The man managed to land a punch on Ashildr's abdomen - a move which cost him two teeth - before shebpulled him round, yanked his shoulder out of its socket, and broke his leg. She was very cross.  
She saw the "nope" cross the final man's face before he ran.   
Ashildr looked around the room, frowning. Thanking God for the fact she was quite comfortable cross dressing, she pulled a knife out of one of her inside pockets and watched as the blade cut straight through the rope.   
"What is that?" Clara asked, freeing herself of the ties and brushing off her dress as she stood.   
Ashildr span it round one finger and slipped it back into her jacket."Pocket knife."   
"It's at least twelve inches."  
"Any knife is a pocket knife if it fits in your pocket."  
Clara laughed, hitching up her dress and starting through the warehouse; Ashildr was momentarily struck by her grace, then got it together and proceeded after her. Just as she went to step around one of the unconscious sailors, he reached out and wrapped his fingers around her ankle. Caught off guard, Ashildr hit the concrete, landing awkwardly with one arm underneath her. She stifled a cry, lashing out with her free foot. She heard the crunch before she had time to process the feeling of a face underneath her boot, but the man managed to hold a form grip around her ankle despite the waterfall of blood falling from his nose. Grunting from the exertion, the sailor continued to cling to Ashildr's thrashing ankle.  
Not a moment too late, Clara appeared and dug her heel into his wrist; the man screamed, letting go of Ashildr, who stumbled to her feet and hid behind Clara, cradling the arm she fell onto.   
"Never a dull moment when you get abducted," she panted.


	5. Things That Go Bump In The Night

Ashildr wished she could have jolted awake, but she was never asleep. Out of the two women, she needed sleep more, but recently she hadn't been getting much - if any at all. The TARDIS kept creaking and groaning in strange places - although nothing that couldn't be explained away by pipes or pressurisation. Whenever something such as that happened, Ashildr would just curl closer to Clara's cool form, burying her head in the jumper she wore to bed and trying to forget about whatever was going on in the rest of the ship.  
But taking a handful of your girlfriend's pajamas and telling yourself that the crashes echoing along the corridors were just your girlfriend's tinkering were in juxtaposition.   
One night, it got particularly bad. The entire ship shook with the unexplained bangs and crashes - Ashildr knew that she shouldn't be so scared, she was a bloody immortal, but it got to her. Trusting Clara with her life, she nestled further into the crook of her neck, squeezing her eyes shut. She lifted her chin, grazing her lips against Clara's. She held her closer, not bothered by being woken for not needing sleep in the first place.   
"Verythin alright?" she mumbled.  
"Sorry, it's stupid," Ashildr said, blowing a breath out of her mouth and patting a hand on Clara's chest.   
"If something's bothering you, it's okay," Clara said, finally waking up.  
"I just keep hearing... Things. In the TARDIS. Like things moving and falling off surfaces," Ashildr whispered, not opening her eyes for embarrassment. She wriggled closer to Clara.   
"Did we say goodbye on that ouija board we did, like, three centuries ago?" Ashildr asked. She knew that placing high prudence in such things resulted in unnecessary fears and a very real possibility of malevolence; but fears are fears.   
"Oh, nevermind yourself, my love." Clara ran a finger over Ashildr's cheekbone before gliding it across her cheek. "It's probably just the cats."  
"We have cats?"  
"Twelve."  
Ashildr pressed her lips together. "These are the kinds of things you talk about in a relationship like ours."


	6. Small Moments

"Do you want a smoothie?" Clara called.   
Ashildr looked up from her book. "Pardon?"  
"You heard me."  
"That's why I'm saying 'pardon'. What's the occasion?"  
"I love you - I'm trying to do something borderline nice." Clara shrugged.   
Ashildr flicked to the next page of the book she held in her hands, placing it on the table in front of her and slumping into the booth. She pulled a pen out of her pocket and twiddled it around one finger.  
"The usual?"   
Clara's voice yanked Ashildr from her thinking. "Um." Her voice sounded all distorted, suddenly. "Sure?"  
Clara chuckled, setting to work. Ashildr pressed her pen into the paper.   
She cleared her throat, knowing that the woman trying her best to showcase her affection would want to know what she was writing.   
"Often, I've wondered of how progression is seen in the eyes of those who see no progression for themselves; of course, on my first trip through, I was living through it and it was consequentially hard to decipher and notice the progression - it all just felt like the marching of time, which blurs after a while."  
"How many subordinate clauses are in that sentence?" Clara slipped into the seat beside Ashildr, sliding the milkshake across the table.   
"Four? Maybe five? Enough. Anyway... Which blurs after a while. In dipping in and out of time, in being able to pick and choose which eras I can visit, I have since been able to compare and contrast, as such, how the world has progressed: regrettably, my results are very much like that of a tango - one step forward, two steps back. Things get better for an oppressed group or the political climate grows stable enough for intelligent discussion and things look as if they are to improve-"  
"And then they don't."  
"-before something small, trivial and unimportant sends the precarious balance spinning off into space and leaving those who so dearly need help and assistance are thrown back into the void.  
"Sometimes, it's saddening. When I think of all those who have lost their lives to the slow crawl of improvement... And yet, I find myself intrigued. I s'pose I'll forever be the scientist." She tapped her pen against her hand.   
"Short sentences for you."   
Ashildr pushed a short breath out from her nose, glancing up at Clara through her eyebrow. She continued to tap the pen, drawing a mouthful of milkshake through the straw.   
"Come around here."   
Clara cocked an eyebrow.   
"C'mon, babe, come sit with me."  
Clara cocked her head, a visible moment of "screw it", and swapped sides of the booth to sit next to Ashildr, who wrapped her arm around her.   
"I keep talking of progress because I forget how lucky I am to have you." Ashildr kissed the top of Clara's head. "In a Viking village, I develop a crush on a woman who actually knows how to bathe - and does so regularly. In a diner-spaceship in space above the fiftieth century, I can tell her I love her."


	7. Nine to Five

"You don't have the patience."  
Ashildr raised an eyebrow. "I'm so old, I lost count of how many millions of years old I am. I spent 1920 until 2572 in a nine to five job. Kindly, shut up about patience, before I take twenty years to remove your toenails one by one."  
Clara raised her hands. Ashildr stared at her, closing the diary sat on the counter, and turned to face Clara.  
"What do I not have the patience for, again?" she asked upon realising she'd forgotten.   
"Les Miserables."  
"Oh, god, no, I don't. Sorry, dear, you can keep your toenails."  
"Oh," Clara said, a false sadness thickening her words. Ashildr sighed and turned to face the counter again. Banter. "Is that a promise? I was so looking forward to you removing my toenails." Clara snuck up behind Ashildr, wrapping her arms around her girlfriends waist. Only Clara could make removing toenails sexy.   
"What would I do with them?" Ashildr always tried to flirt back, but the cool and sultry façade she had worn for every woman since the dawn of time (give or take) and spent thousands of lifetimes practising always slipped around Clara. Her voice faltered. Palms sweat. Laugh came out too fast and too loud.   
"You probably have a collection somewhere."  
"Sod off!" Ashildr elbowed her.   
Clara gasped, laughed, and spun away from Ashildr.   
Oh, no, you don't.   
Ashildr turned on the ball of her foot and took Clara's hand, pulling her in so that their faces were inches apart.   
"Why did you work a nine to five for six hundred and fifty two years?"   
"I wanted to make it seven hundred so the dates were nice, but they were ruled immoral by the high courts."  
"That doesn't explain why you did it."  
"I'm a masochist."  
"Should I remove your toenails?"  
"Shut up."  
And she did.


	8. Breaking

Clara's smile didn't pull at her eyes, which it should've. Something was wrong.  
"Hey, hey, hey," Ashildr called, grabbing her arm and spinning her back to face her. Ashildr wiggled into her arms. "What's up?"  
Clara smiled again, though it still didn't reach her eyes. Clara reached around Ashildr to the radio sat on the counter, flicking it on and leaving it to whatever station it had been tuned to.  
Ashildr winced. Metal. The heavy stuff. Sounded like pig growls and thunder to her, though Clara swore blind they were intricate and musical patterns.   
"I love the chords in this song," Clara muttered, leaning her forehead against her girlfriend's.   
Ashildr couldn't pick out even any guitars. "If you say so," she laughed.   
Clara sighed, hugely, before lifting her chin as if to kiss Ashildr only to drop it down again. "It's the anniversary."   
"Of what?"  
"D-" Clara cut herself off. She couldn't bring herself to say his name.  
Danny.  
They discussed Danny's parting rarely. Clara had never forgotten. She probably never would.  
Ashildr saw how it tore her up; every year, her heart ripped to pieces again as she relived the horrendous events of that day.  
It was like Danny had died three times, in a way. The first time, he was on the phone to her, talking to her. Ashildr could barely imagine the pain. It would have been as if her chest was crushed by a hydraulic press. She knew the feeling. Talking to her.  
And he hadn't been left in peace, either. Ripped from his grave and encased in metal, made cyber. Reincarnated, only to die again, saving her. Talking to her, saving her.  
Then, when given the chance to go back to her, he instead reanimated the boy he had killed while at war. She had been given hope of his return only to have a child appear in her flat. Talking to her, saving her, doing a kind act.   
Danny, the man thrice dead, witnessed each and every time by the woman who loved him so feircely she could have powered the sun.  
Clara held Ashildr, face buried in her neck, sobbing gently, for a long time.  
Ashildr's position was far from enviable. She knew that Clara loved her, she had to, traipsing around time and space hand in hand, but she'd never gotten over Danny. It was still fresh for her, although she would never admit it. It wasn't often she let Ashildr see her fallen apart like this, broken like this, and every time she did Ashildr felt her heart break.   
Not only the pain she knew Clara felt but the pain it passed to her. She was crying over her last partner. It doesn't matter how compassionate you are, that stings.  
"Hey, hey," Ashildr murmered, rubbing her shoulder. "I've got you."  
"Don't die on me, love," Clara gasped through sobs. "Please-"  
"I won't. Believe me, death is very difficult."  
The music continued in the background. Clara sniffed, raising her head. Ashildr brushed her tears away.  
"You're allowed to hurt."  
Clara nodded. "It's funny," she said, " how I always swore my heart beat for Danny." She took Ashildr's hand from her face and placed it on her chest. "Now, it's still for you."  
"Clara, I have lived and I have lived. I have lived so much I fear I have lived too much. Even in a universe this collosal, only so much life can be filled. You have been my reason to continue for so long now I doubt either of us recall how long. Clara, I've seen you die. That image has been burned into my brain, never allowing me to forget. I know I will lose you. And after that, I shall lay down and die-"  
"No!"   
"Clara, my love. It's okay. You'll be gone before I am. You needn't worry. You shan't miss me. You've given me so much life! Vigour! But, know this; life is like ice cream. You give it to a child, and they cling to it, demanding they eat as much as they like. Eat it all day. There grows a time, you must understand, that it becomes too much and one wants to throw up. I've reached that point, dear, and I've passed it. I have gorged on life for far longer than I should have. I'm millennia old, and life expectancy for my time was thirty! I couldn't bear to live without you, so I won't. But I shan't miss anything, I don't think."  
Clara took Ashildr's hand and squeezed, threatening never to let go.


	9. As War Fades

Broken, defeated, bruised - the victims of war lay scattered across the field, like rag dolls strewn across the dirt; forgotten. Disregarded. Ashildr had lived through most human history - she'd seen bodies before, on every scale of destruction and number. From the butchered bodies with axes still lodged in their skulls to people cast aside en mass from nuclear fallout, and she rather wished to forget most of it. 

Clara, however, had not. Her experience of the deceased was limited to pretty bodied in morgues and the occasional dismembered limb. And certainly not anything on this scale.

"What happened here?" she breathed, staring out at the field of corpses that stretched all through the valley. Two mountains separated by a river of the dead.

Ashildr stepped out from the safety of the diner and farther into the battlefeild. "Humanity."

Clara followed suit and took Ahildr's hand. Ashildr's heart spiked in concern - Clara was never one for PDA's, and especially not one for letting her emotions overwhelm her cool exterior. Ashildr squeezed her hand. "Getting to you, is it, love?" she asked gently.

Clara glanced over, catching Ashildr's eyes for the briefest of moments, and then fixing her gaze to the ground. "How can it not get to you? Ash, we're in a graveyard."

The stench was nearly unbearable. The longer she stood out in it, the more Ashildr could feel it. She let Clara's hand fall from her own to untie the bandana from around her wrist. Expertly, she unrolled it, the folded it in half and handed it to Clara.

"Cover your nose and mouth," she instructed. "It'll help with the smell. See that tent, up the top of that side of the valley? Hopefully somewhere up there has an explanation. Hopefully we can stop this from happening on this planet again."

"Isn't that a bit... Doctor-y?" Clara's voice was muffled by the bandana. 

"It is, yes, but I'm not wading through one more goddamn battlefield in my entire life if I can help it."

Of course, Ashildr was painfully aware of how she would, most likely, have another sea of corpses waiting for her soon enough. For many more years that could ever be documented in a library of a reasonable size, she had found herself at the scene of domestic tragedy. Even if it was one death, one body, one life ripped from the hands of a child who had barely even lived, she swore, never again. The Doctor's voice echoed in her head. We need the mayflies. That doesn't mean we can't try and save them, though. 

That was the Doctor's whole thing. Ashildr's thoughts pulsed in time with the squelch of the grassy hillside underneath her boots. He can't disapprove if he would do the same thing.

Oh, contrare, a voice from the back of her mind piped up. The Doctor despised himself and every decision he'd ever made. Self-hatred was basically his branding. How do you convince yourself you're a decent person with more blood on your hands than you can remember?

Once the pair reached the tent, eveything changed. The material parted as two heavily armed, mud-caked boys came running out. They held guns out in front of their scared faces, eyes skittish and so young. Ashildr raised her hands reflexively, but was far too desensitised to be anywhere near afraid.

Clara laughed from behind her bandana. "This whole guns thing isn't considered polite where we come from." She pulled it off from her nose and let it rest around her neck. "People invite you in and ask if you want a cuppa, actually."

Ashildr turned her head slowly to stare her dumbass girlfriend right in the eye. She was far to ballsy for-

Oh. Anger. She's grieving. 

The soldiers readied their rifles, taking a shuffled step closer to the pair.

"Let them in," a raspy voice called from inside the tent. "Old Earth slang. They're friendly."

One of the boys lowered his weapon immediately; the other hesitated, finger itchy and distrusting on the trigger, before straightening up from behind it. His eyes never left the women. Military idiots. Shoot first, ask questions later, set up camp on the hill above your dead comrades. There was so much money in suffering. 

The tent was basic - fabric tied around poles sunk six inches into the ground with a slab that barely classified for a table slap bang in the middle. Duct-tape doctoring was pretty much the only thing keeping the old general's head on his round little shoulders so deep were the gashes on his neck. How was he still alive?

"Welcome, humans," he wheezed. He made the attempt to sit up, bracing one arm against the plinth underneath him and pushing upwards before slumping back down again. One of the boys pushed between the two travellers, supporting his head and neck as he settled back into the stone. "General Karl. I would shake your hand, but..." He raised both his arms to show his rounded off wrists. "Bastards took my hands!" He chuckled darkly, which then led to him coughing up a Jackson Pollock. Internal bleeding, multiple limp amputations, and partial decapitation. This man had a best before and it was yesterday.

Ashildr stared. "How are you not dead?" she blurted, aware of her rudeness but honestly far too interested to care. 

The other boy spoke from behind them. "The enemy we fought are savages in appearance only. They know how to sustain a man on the brink of death and never give him the peace of passing over. And they're not long gone. How did you get here?"

Ashildr pretended not to notice his finger inching towards his trigger again.

Clara pointed her thumb over her shoulder. "Big, fat building that just happened to materialise? Did- Did you catch it?"

It was like she wanted to get the both of them shot.

"What did this?"

"We mustn't say. Speak of the devil and so he shall appear."

The general scoffed - well, he made a sort of groaning wheeze, but it was probably meant to be a scoff - before being thrown into another coughing fit. "We don't know. All we know is that it turns people into monsters and sets them loose on the rest of the world. We terraformed this planet years ago and spent millennium building a peaceful society that was wiped out in an instant. We are the only survivors. Run."

Ashildr stared down at the man for an uncomfortable length of time, lips pressed together and brows furrowed. "A parasite that causes aggression and unprovoked violence? Isn't that a bit 28 Days Later?"

Clara turned her head slowly around and stared Ashildr right in the eye. Ashildr looked back, bewildered.

"28 Days Later?" Clara said. "You can remember a midrange horror film from the 2000's but not our 50th anniversary?"

"This is not the time, Cla-"

"Why do I have a feeling it never will be? I only watched that film with you because Naomie Harris is in it. And, thinking about it, maybe Cillian Murphy-"

"If you could have this domestic on your way out." The general wheezed from the effort of talking. One of the boys wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. "I'd rather like to die... Free of your sinning."

Clara felt Ashildr remember what it was to be dying at the exact same time as she did. Poor sod. 

"Be on your way, please. He needs peace."

The wind picked up a little outside - the canvas of the tent flapped   
threateningly around its occupants' ankles. 

Ashildr took Clara's hand and pulled her out back into the field. As the putrid stench hit her once more, Clara nearly collapsed - she caught herself just before falling face-first down the side of the valley.

She was aware, in the back of her mind, that this was not a battle they were capable of winning.   
And it sucked.

Once back within the safely breathable air of the diner, the two sank down onto the floor with their backs to the glass doors and stared out onto the linoleum.

"There's nothing we can do. The planet's dead. There's three men left."

Ashildr took Clara's hand. The planets where they were uninaquivecaboly too late were the worst - they plonked themselves down in the middle of a warzone, the walking banner of false hope, simply to discover that, sometimes, history takes it course.

The silence of the diner swarmed around them like the Vashta Nerada of denial, faintly tinged around the edges with plan-making, before slowly melting into the ever burning malcontent that came with the feeling of hopelessness.

"28 Days Later?" Clara's voice broke the silence.

The glass in front of the acceptance shattered. 

"Clara, my love, light of my life, I am telling you that there is a difference between films and anniversary dates! Do you have any idea how much history I have to remember?"

"And you don't remember films?"

"By the time films came out, I'd been reading for centuries. There are only so many plots. Good films stick with me. Besides, I was mega goth in the 21st Century, so the zombie apocalypse vibe was exactly what I needed."

"Until 2020 happened."

"Yes, well, that was certianly not fun."


	10. Familiar Faces (Ish)

Ashildr let Clara take her arm as the two strolled through the tranquility of Hyde Park on a dwindling summer's evening in the early 21st century. Long ago, Ashildr had lost all affections for Earth and the petty rituals of those who crawled across its silly little crust; Clara, however, still felt almost patriotic ties to her planet and found comfort in the familiarity of wood pigeons and petrechore. It doesn't matter how much of the solar system they had to choose from - and, in the case of these two, it was literally all of it - Earth would always be a fan-favourite.   
Ashildr only came back because of Clara. It wasn't that she hated the planet, no - she didn't think it was good enough to warrant such strong emotions. Plus, it's the 21st century and everyone is still surprisingly racist. Clara was country music, happy to die in her hometown; Ashildr was pop-punk, suffocating at the idea.   
Clara stopped suddenly. A pace ahead, Ashildr's arm jolted as she caught it around Clara's elbow.  
"What is it?"  
But Clara just stared directly ahead, a smile slowly taking over the whole of her wide, wide face. Ashildr followed her gaze, spinning on one foot until she saw it.  
There, in the park, bold as you like: a blue police telephone box.  
Before Ashildr could even turn back to look at her, Clara had made off running towards the box.   
"Oh, Jesus, never a day off from the running, is it?" Ashildr muttered to herself, taking off in pursuit.  
The blue door loomed ahead of the pair (once Ash had caught up), deathly quiet, so awfully familiar to Clara in the way it was completely different.  
"What if it's not him?" Clara whispered suddenly.  
"Did you knock?"  
"Not yet."  
"Well, we won't know until we do, will we?"  
Ashildr rapped on the door, a swift beat of three - she was tempted to knock four times, but eventually decided that that would be mean: her and the Doctor didn't have the best of track records, exactly.  
When the door swing open - inwards - they revealed a man, older, grey, and with eyes that were kind in a joking, lad-like way.  
Clara looked him right in the face. "Doctor?"  
"Yeah, not quite, cockle," he said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. "Come on in. Doc, we've got guests."  
Ashildr and Clara exchanged a glance, shrugged in unison, and stepped through the once familiar doors.  
What they were greeted with, however, was not familiar at all. Instead of the kitchen-like, buisness-grey interior, massive pillars of crystal extended up to an uneven ceiling, with fronds and orange mood lighting singing the whole, grotesque, cave-in-a-fire like environment.   
"You've redecorated." Clara said. She heard a spanner clang as it hit the metal floors. "I don't like it."  
From behind the central pillar (crystal, protruding, like the rest of them), the head of a blonde woman appeared, visor of a welding helmet lifted to reveal beaming eyes and a flashing smile.  
"Clara. I was wondering when I'd bump into you two again."  
Alright. Doctor's a woman now. And not grumpy. That's- bizarre, but stranger things have happened. High school English teacher.  
"Plot twist," Ashildr breathed.  
Clara leaned over to her. "I would."   
Ashildr rolled her eyes and groaned.  
"Doctor. Are you a hugging person now? Because I don't know how long it's been for you, but it's been ages for us two. And we didn't exactly have a happy ending."  
The Doctor barely said a thing, simply smiling, and ran towards Clara, sweeping her up in her arms and spinning her around a brief once before plonking her back down again.  
"It's been too long." The Doctor smiled briefly before heading back over to the console and collecting her spanner once more. "I lose track. Years blur when you're my age, you know. It's probably been about... A thousand years?"  
Ashildr snorted. "I understand."  
The Doctor didn't respond. Ashildr understood clearly enough. The old man had loved Clara relentlessly; Ashildr had killed her. Different relations that provoked understandably different responses.  
Clara followed the new Doctor around to the console, standing opposite her and leaning around the central column. "The missus and I have been travelling around for God knows how long now."  
"'The missus?'" the Doctor repeated, surprised.  
"Oh, come on, you saw Jane Austen and I, you can't seriously be surprised."   
She scratched the back of her head with the spanner, blowing out a breath. "I always assumed people didn't date people who killed them."  
Ashildr bristled. When someone lives as long as Ashildr had, guilt begins to grow on one's mind like an tumour of the soul; it becomes an inescapable darkness, a monster one runs from - and in those nights of sorrow, where the guilt grew to be too much, where the darkness was enveloping and the monster larger and uglier than ever to be seen, it was Clara's death that weighed Ashildr's mind down so in the depths of her actions that drowned her.  
"Sorry, does anyone want to explain what's going on? Because I'm usually pretty good, right, but I'm severely lost. Is anyone else lost?" the man who opened the door said. "Look, we respect your privacy, Doc, but we don't know the half of who you are."  
Ashildr, in her awe of the Doctor's continued surprises, had failed to take in to account the two children stood alongside the old man: a woman, maybe in her twenties, stood with the stance of perceived authority but the face of a woman lost, and a boy the same age who was just so used to not understanding he had started to hide it in his face.  
"Fam," the Doctor began, straightening up, "this is Clara. I travelled with her for a while. Clara, Me, these are Yaz, Graham and Ryan."  
"Ashildr's fine. I have a constant now."  
"What did you mean when you said 'killed them?'" the woman, Yaz, asked.  
Clara cleared her throat. The Doctor turned her head down to the console, flicking switched and adjusting things that were already perfectly aligned.  
"It's alright," Ashildr sighed. "Basically, Clara travelled with the Doctor here when he- sorry, she, old brain - when she was her last face, and, actually, the face before that, where they came across me. A young Viking girl. I died. The Doctor saved my life and granted me immortality on accident."  
"How do you grant someone immortality on accident?" Ryan spoke like the lad he looked like.   
"Spacey-wacey." Clara, Ashildr and the Doctor all spoke at the same time. Ashildr sighed again and continued.   
"And, then, due to some rather unfortunate events with a Quantum Shade in my possession, Clara died. She was pulled from her time stream in between her penultimate and final heartbeats and then smuggled away from Gallifery - actually, no, brazenly stolen would probably be more accurate - as to return her to life. But her death is a fixed event, so she hasn't re-entered time. She's still in bewteen heartbeats. So we eloped, basically, and started exploring the universe."  
"Eloped is a strong word, dear."  
"Not really."  
The Graham dude laughed. "Me and my wife met while she was treating me for cancer! Darkness breeds love, eh, cockles?"  
"Indeed." As a force of habit, Ashildr folded her hands behind her back.  
Graham smiled at them through the gloom. "How long have you been together?"  
"We lose track. We reckon it's coming up on three thousand years."  
"Mayflies," the Doctor said, suddenly serious, glaring at Ashildr from under her eyebrows.   
From the corner of her eye, Ashildr watched as Ryan shrugged at Yaz.  
The darkness of the TARDIS seemed to deepen.  
"Oh, you never did like me, did you, you old crone?" Clara growled, lifting her elbows off of the console. The Doctor smiled, stroking the central column. Some things never change. Still a madman in a box.


	11. When Is It Night In Space, Anyway?

Clara didn't need to sleep, not really. Not unlike her breathing, it was more habit than anything else; despite the fact she had been functionally dead (yum) for a heck of a lot longer than she was ever alive, she still felt the need to collapse and become an unconscious lump for eight hours. 

Fuzzy, on the far reaches of her memory, an adventure from long ago appeared, accompanied by a word: Morpheus. Humans need to sleep. So does every conscious being in the universe, apparently. Makes sense - one tends to become at odds with oneself when one is forced to spend a never-ending amount of time in one's company.

But that night was one of the many when Clara simply could not sleep. She lay awake, flat on her back, Ashildr completely draped across her, staring at the ceiling and thinking.

About anything and everything. 

It wasn't until she stirred that Clara realised she'd been running her fingers through Ashildr's hair. She shifted, pulling Clara closer still (a surprising action, as she was already laid across Clara's front with her full weight).

"Morning, you." Clara cleared her throat.

Ashildr groaned. "When is it night in space, anyway?"

"I didn't wake you, did I?" 

Ashildr reached around and scratched her shoulder, shaking her head. 

Oh, that's something, at least.

"When did, you, y'know. Realise you liked girls?" Ashildr asked, rather out of nowhere.

The question knocked Clara off her feet somewhat. She thought for a moment before answering. "Oh, you know," she eventually said, carefully, "I just sort of always did. I had crushes on girls, crushes on boys, and that's just how it was. I could forget about the whole liking girls thing, though, because I had boyfriends. But then the term bi came across my radar and that sorta explained everything nicely. I always knew in and of myself, I suppose, but I first became aware of it all properly in high school. My parents were really good about it."

"My parents were dead, so I was off the hook." Ashildr chuckled darkly.

"What about you?"

Despite the darkness that enveloped the room, Clara knew Ashildr was smiling. She could feel it.

"I was a girl surrounded by Viking men. When a beautiful woman with all the knowledge of the stars fell to Earth with a smile that could upturn a longboat, how was I supposed to react? Of course, that was a different time, and I didn't really know what I was feeling until much later. I certainly knew when you turned up in Tra- well." She swallowed. "The next time I saw you."

"I was under your personal protection. That much was absolute."  
Ashildr groaned again and buried her head in Clara's chest. "I was flirting! That was me badly flirting!" Her words came flying out of her mouth in a tumble.

Clara chuckled and kissed the top of her wife's head; she had been a mite preoccupied that day. "You don't need to feel guilty about that, Ash. In the end, that day brought us here."

"I've seen you die, Clara. It's inescapable. One day, you're going to go back to that street and I'm going to lose you all over again."

"You needn't worry about that, babe. I'm surprisingly difficult to get rid of. Pancakes?"

"Pancakes."


	12. S W O R D S

"Clara, Clara, Clara, Clara! Clara!" 

Ashildr's voice echoed through the whole of the diner - when she came skittering through into the dining area, her cactus socks taking her feet out from underneath her as she bolted through the door from the console room, so did the echoing crash of her shoulder against the metal doorframe.

"Ow. Guess what I found!" 

"If it's not a pair of trousers."

Ashildr glanced down at her bare legs. "Ah. Well, that's what I was looking for." Her smile never resigned control of her face, though. She brandished two oblong parcels, one in each hand. 

"What are they?" Clara asked, standing up and taking one to examine it. She nearly dropped it, such was the unexpected heft.

"Ulfberts!"

Clara stared blankly. Ashildr searched her eyes for a moment, still beaming.

"Right, so, basically, they're swords!" She took the leather-wrapped stick still in her hand and placed it down on the counter of the diner, flipping back the brown leather to reveal the twinkling metal. Clara slipped the same leather down a little on the sword in her own hands to reveal the hilt. "I completely forgot we had them," Ashildr said, eyes shining in awe as she ran her hand along the blade. "Damaskis steel, through tang, sharper than a dragons tooth... The craftsmanship of one of these things, Clara..." 

It was beautiful, Clara had to admit - the metal shone in the hard light of the diner, capped only by the leather wrapping on the hilt. Clara didn't know enough about swords to appreciate it further.

"See," Ashildr went on, picking up the sword and swinging it around expertly, "I never got to wield one of these, not properly. The balance... My lot fought with axes, mostly, see - we were too poor to afford something even remotely sword-y, so we just used our work tools. You remember. Ulfberts like these were passed down from father to son, worth the equivalent of thousands. Beautiful."

Never before had Clara seen such admiration for an object. She was aware of the weight of the sword in her hands, and the apparent value, so set it down on the counter.

Inside the wrap for the sword in Ashildr's hand was a note, written in a hand that was both unfamiliar and homely. It read,

Go be sword lesbians.  
B+H.

"B and H?" Clara asked, letting her finger glance over the text.

"Bill and Heather," Ashildr murmmered. "A parting gift from when we travelled together so long ago. How kind."

Clara nodded her agreement. When she looked over at Ashildr again, she was met with gleaming, exited eyes and her wife's biggest, toothiest smile. Even a wee eyebrow waggle. 

Ash was the first to break eye contact, turning on her heel and floundering down the hall again.

"Where are you off to, now?" Clara called after her.

"I'm gonna go make something eat shit!"

And, with that, still wearing only a t-shirt and socks, Ashildr ran off back through the diner, this time wielding a ferocious weapon.


	13. Does Sarcasm Help?

"Next time I want something from someone slimy, I'm going to promise them our first born child."

Clara snorted before making a double take. "Ashildr, we're gay."

"Clara, my dear, that's exactly the point. That way, I never have to pay." Ashildr grinned. "I can't exactly promise them a lifetime of servitude, can I? I'd be stood in the remains of their civilization thinking, 'Ah, well, guess I should help move the rubble.'"

"And trying to steal it leaves us in the most glorious of hotels." 

Clara lifted her shackled wrists to notion around the dungeon they found themselves in. By the light fitting through the one miniscule window barely the size of a skull, the boxy room of flagstone was exposed to be little more than damp, echo-y and, for lack of a better term, 'a bit grim'. Spiders twitched across the walls, the trickle of water betrayed its location - Wales - and it smelled like freshly decomposing corpses.

Probably because of the skeleton in the back corner.

Ashildr scrunched her nose in agreement. "Yes, well. I didn't think I'd get caught."

"Yeah, well, you did!"

A drip of water landed right on Ashildr's forehead. Her wrist cracked as the manacles stopped her from wiping it away. "The first born works though," she insisted. "I look young enough to be unmarried."

"Not in the sixteenth century. People die in their thirties, they get breeding early." 

"My kids died of the Black Death. That's a fun story for Christmas dinners. Oh, wait, we don't have those, either, because my family died in a Viking village at least seven centuries before yours were born." The pain never waned in Ashildr's chest - the more time went on, the more grief she added, and none of it ever went away. Black humour is a staple, you see it everywhere: healthcare workers, police, morticians, immortals.

"What's put you in such a good mood today, then?"

"You certainly seem to be dealing with the sleep deprivation, starvation, and sheer grimy nature of this dungeon much better than I am."

"Last time I was in one of these, the Doctor and Robin Hood were debating who would die first."

"One's immortal and the other isn't real. Tough question."

"Oh, he was real."

"Honestly, some days, I think I should just give up and start being religious, the amount of random crap that actually exists in this hellhole of a universe."

"Does sarcasm help?"

"My lot came up with sarcasm."

"Really?"

"Yeah, it's a Norse word." 

"Nice."

The door creaked open to reveal the head of a man who was a complete stranger to both toothbrushes and washbasins. My God. Yes, it's 1572, but, c'mon, can't you wash? The man flashed his blackened teeth. His smile was false, sadistic. His eyes betrayed the pleasure he took in seeing those who dared rebel against the fascist schemes of unelected monarchs. But he stayed in the door.

"Oh, come in, don't be shy," Clara teased. "I have a very nice axe to show you."

Where did Clara get an axe? Actually, you know what? Ashildr wasn't gonna ask.


	14. Shrödinger's Nonce

Most of Clara's nights were sleepless.

Some of Ashildr's were, too.

Overlap made things interesting.

Some days, it led to adventure; saving worlds, getting shot at, that sort of thing. Others, it led to the two curling up in one of the many armchairs in the library they had slowly filled with their lives and reading their memories to each other. Clara never tired of hearing what Ashildr saw in the world around her, so different was it to her perception: especially of herself. Yet, on nights where the conditions were perfect, their mutual sleeplessness led to confined chaos. Food fights in the diner - spilled milkshakes against the linoleum, laughter and cream on noses, and tipsy conversations that led to interesting morale and philosophical dilemma.

It was on a night such as this, with the Medusa Cascade floating by past the glass of the real-time envelope, that Clara raised the question of the 'Shrödinger's nonce.'

Ashildr, of course, laughed at the very idea. "How can someone be a nonce and not a nonce at the same time?" she had asked.

Clara, in her slightly drunken state, had risen to the occasion of answering the question. "We are both Shrödinger's nonces. Think about it. Let's talk bodies - yours is, effectively, nineteen, and mine is in its 30's. Somewhere. Time travel, it gets difficult to keep track. Meaning, I'm a bit of a nonce. However-" She had nearly fallen over at this point, caught only by Ashildr, who had had her nose booped "-you're four and a half billion, give or take."

"When one is counting in tens of years, days are misplaced. When one is counting in billions of years, centuries get lost. Sit down, you idiot."

(Ashildr had not had nearly as much to drink.)

Clara had slumped down into a booth, still grinning a shit-eating grin. "Fair. As I was saying - you're four and a half billion at our time of eloping, whereas I'm still effectively in my thirties, making you the nonce. We are both nonce-ees and nonce-ers simultaneously! What do you think of that, eh, Ash?" 

"I think it's time for bed."


	15. That Which Beguiled Her

Darkness breeds darkness. Shadows multiply, coalesce, linger; they glare. And in no place are they more prolific than the human mind. 

One such breeding ground for these shadows crouched on one of the tables in the diner, casting perhaps the largest taint onto Ashildr's soul she had ever felt.

Staring. Looming. 

She glared at it, fingers interlocked under her chin to support the overarching weight of her own mind, so enveloped in her internal conquest to purge the impure from existence she had missed the fact her very heart had inquested into her actions.

The words barely made it through the thick fog of thought clouding Ashildr's mind. In fact, so invested was she, Ashildr failed to even meet the eyes of the woman across from her until after she felt her lover's hand on her arm.

"Why are you intensely staring at a cake?"

"For the pure and simple reasoning that it is, functionally and for all purposes, completely impossible." An impossible number of questions, an impossible number of impossibilities, all sat before her. Mocking. "The very existence of these things... They shake me to my core, Clara. I cannot live in peace while these exist. What magic could possibly create such an evil?"

"Well, I'd imagine it developed over many years- Ash, where are you going?"

A gap in the fog. The puzzle slotting together. Missing pieces falling into an order that aligned. The answer shone, as plain as the harsh white of the console she now stood at - the lighthouse in the storm to ail all that made no sense.

"If a bootstrap paradox was to occur," she declared, "then sense could be made of these such Devil's folly. The cake exists because it always has!" She smiled, triumphant, aware, winning.

Then, she slowed. She realised.

A massacre of Time was something she did not bat an eyelash at, was even completely complacent in creating, because an invention of ingenious descendants of hers beguiled her. For no reason other than her punity. 

The Doctor's words, some of the very few she ever remembered through the Mists of Time that condemned her so, rang in her ears.

We need the mayflies.

Ashildr collapsed, no longer able to support the weight of her consciousness. "I'm a disheveled husk of disappointment and unaccomplished childhood dreams. I am a blasphemous heretic: I challenged God to strike me down, expecting lightning; instead, he struck me with hubris, and decided that my demise would be by my own hand. I am a woman so afraid of silence for the violence of her own thoughts is the company of an executioner."

"We are the most unreliable narrators of our own lives."

"I am afraid my understanding is not what it could be." She flicked her head up, eyes suddenly ablaze; she felt the disheartenment that her face so clearly betrayed. How much of a child she must have looked.

"It means," Clara said, covering Ashildr's hands with her own, "that you cannot possibly know for sure that you are a disappointment and heretic for the same reason a tree cannot be aware it is in a forest." 

Far too long had Ashildr been travelling. Far too old had she become. Far too careless she was prepared to be.


	16. Silence in the Library

The TARDIS is a miracle of technology by the standards of every race. Modifiable dimensions across multiple planes - rooms that grow and change to exactly how you need them without a single thing ever needing to be programmed or plugged in: sentient, intelligent technology, grown from coral on a planet in the far reaches of a galaxy, once brilliant and shining, now rubble, but still glowing through all the star systems, immune to time itself. 

Men love their cars, but do cars love their men?

TARDISes form not only attachments but opinions, capable of both conscious, independent thought and access to a hive mind: sometimes, through the humming of the corridors, the pulsing of the heart of the clock that ticked in the belly of the great ship, Clara could feel the diner reaching out for the police box: two knackered type 40's, both grasping through all of time and space for their only living sister. In fact, she wouldn't put it past the police box to be slandering her shamelessly, if ever her diner did make contact. But she wouldn't put it past the diner to defend her, either. Some nights, when the air was chilled and the hard floors absorbed the sound of her padding feet for the sake of their own peace, Clara knew her ship was cradling her in its metal arms. 

The genius of the machine was its constant shaving of rooms it did not need. It seemed as though a basic template was adopted and modified by the machine to suit the travellers it accompanied; a living room had once sat down the corridor from the secondary kitchens (dubbed the "night kitchens", as Clara often slipped out to them as Ashildr slept to make souflés), but, as the TARDIS realised that that particular room served no purpose, it merged with the library. Now, in amongst the rows of diaries and ever expanding shelves, sat not only the occasional arm or wingback chairs but grey sofas and coffee tables and all sorts of wonderful pieces of paraphernalia the two had to look up in their recounts to remember the stories behind. 

Of an evening, the two women would retire to the library to write their recounts as not to forget them and talk of their blissful nonsenses. Ashildr would sit at the desk, quill and ink next to a Victorian style lamp, fading around the edges into the back of a chair designed for a man twice her size. Clara preferred the large and rather squishy armchair a little further off and side-on to the desk. Here, she would pull her legs up onto the fabric and rest a great tome against her knees, either to write or, often, read.

"Do you ever proof read?" Clara asked on one such evening.

Ashildr glanced over, the sound of a scratching quill ever constant. "Nope. Once the bastard words leave my bastard skull, they are no longer my problem. Why do you ask?"

"An awful lot of comma splicing in here," Clara murmmered, motioning the book in her arms. "Characteristic of your stuff in 1892; it's like you forgot grammar for a year. But, then again, you've got so many stacked subordinate clauses in here I have no idea if it's correct or not."

"It's also probably awfully close to Middle English."

"Not really. It's more Lord Byron than anything else."

They remained in silence for a few moments before Ashildr's quill stopped scratching. Clara tried not to take too much notice - this book was getting interesting.

She cleared her throat. "1892, did you say?"

"Yes," Clara replied, "and very interesting it is, too. Listen to this: 'I fear that Clara was a figment of the imagination of a dying mind: if it weren't for my dairies' recounts of her, I would surely believe that I had made her up as a method of consoling myself in my final days; an ageless grey God who saves us all with puppets is possible indeed, but a woman of such awesome power that could encapsulate me so I still dream of her touch centuries on is simply a thought I bare not entertain.' Did you have a crush on me or something?"

Ashildr had buried her head in her hands. "I see what you mean about stacking dependant clauses." 

"Hey, just a thought," Clara's suggested, smile audible, "but all this talk of grammar got me thinking about my old Earth job. Do you want to go back in time and ask John Steinbeck if the ranch really was a microcosm for society or just the result of spitballing?" 

"That sentence was incomprehensible."


	17. Indiscernible Endless Screaming

"Hhjjejsjkkkkkkshajejwajjhhhhshajdbsjwkkkehsjsjjhejakdhsjskehdhsjsjdhrjsjdhahakeojeowoaollwkekwoowlejwkwkjekwkwkwkakaajrjeiwjeheyriwkhrkwoeipwoj!"

"How did you just make that sound with your mouth?"


	18. Chapter 18

As Albert Einstein once famously said, "I know not with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones." And he was right.

Swords came very much back into popularity after everyone thoroughly mulched each other in the wars of 6,000,000,000 and thereabouts; the proverbial wisdom of a post-apocalyptic universe agreed that personal protection was necessary in amongst nuclear wastelands, but should not hold the ability to destroy a continent. 

It was for these reasons that Ashildr could get away with carrying her newly discovered Ulfbert around with her in the far future: it was commonplace. Ashildr had little memory of the interstellar wars that had stricken the zones she later traversed with Clara, however; she had limited storage in her memory - Clara's soft frame melting into a field of gentle grass was a far preferable image to planets launching nukes at each other. 

In the same vein, the far past also excused the carrying of personal stabby-things, although it often highlighted wealth more than anything. Before the propane forge, swords such as the Ulfbert were, for lack of a better term, a bitch to make - carrying a damascus blade in times when damascus was made by sticking a clay pot full of iron under a bunch of coals was a statement of power. 'Look at me,' it said. 'I'm rich and have a bloody good blacksmith.'

The biggest problem was in the eons between the far past and the far future. Ashildr had seen too much death by this time to ever take joy in a machine designed to kill multitudes of people very swiftly - swords were contained; efficient, but localised; guns and bombs, however, were indiscriminate. Messy. Old wars killed dozens. New ones killed millions. So, even through the deadzone, she continued to carry the sword - things did try to kill her and the missus alarmingly often.

Clara tried to find the humour in it. She really did. However, there are only so many cells you can see before they get dull.

"You should've given the nice armed police officer your sword."

Ashildr pressed her lips together, letting her hand flop against her stomach as she laid on the flat surface masquerading as a bed. The blank roof of the holding cell sneered at her idle mind.

Clara sat below her, near Ashildr's feet, leaning her back against the solid brick of the bed. She had one arm flopped over her knee. Her head was in the other. "I'm telling you," she continued, "that next time we're going out, you're leaving that bloody Ulfbert at home."

Ashildr stayed quiet. She turned her head around to look at Clara. "They didn't have to tackle me, though. I have bruised ribs."

Clara chuckled.

"Oi! I'm in genuine pain!"

"It was quite funny. You went down like a sack of spuds."

"You're such a twat." Ashildr batted Clara around the head playfully. They laughed together for a moment, before Ashildr winced as the pain enveloped her again.

Clara turned around, still smiling but obviously concerned. "Let me have a look," she said.

She shuffled closer to Ashildr's torso. "You alright if I lift your shirt a bit?"

Ashildr nodded but looked away. It doesn't matter if you've been married for centuries, making eye contact with the woman palpating you is always a tad awkward. 

Clara inched the hem of Ashildr's shirt up to reveal the purple bruises blemishing across her ribs. As Clara brushed her fingers across them, Ashildr winced. Her fingers were cold.

"Could you, like, rub your hands together a bit? They're freezing."

"No. Cold hands are your punishment for getting me thrown in yet another prison." She continued to inspect Ashildr's blunt force trauma, apologising when she grunted in pain. "Yeah, that's gonna smart, but you should be alright. Trust your little piece of Mire." Clara kissed Ashildr's forehead as she pulled her shirt back down. When she returned to sitting at the foot of the bed, she passed one arm back around behind her, resting it on the edge of the bed - Ashildr wrapped her fingers around Clara's palm.

They sat in silence for a minute, simply staring into the quiet of the concrete box. Their breathing echoed off the blank, blank walls, coming back to them in clumps of stale exasperation; occasionally, if they were lucky, it wouldn't come back to them at all, instead floating up and out through the window set close to the ceiling.

"Be glad we're not in America," Ashildr offered. "They'd say we're Antifa and lock us up as terrorists."

Clara laughed once, cynical. "Death by the blade of the dispossessed is very anti-fascist." 

"We're not dispossessed, not as such. More... I dunno, what are we?" Ashildr stretched out her legs. These ribs were gonna be fun for six to eight weeks.

"Who cares what we are or aren't?" Clara's teacher voice seemed to turn on and off involuntarily these days. Currently, it was on. "Isn't it more about the pure poetisism of the news report?"

"Poetisism or propaganda?"

Teacher voice switched off again. "Same thing."

Ashildr let her gaze drift to the window. She examined it for a moment before jamming her elbows beneath her and sitting up with a wheeze. "We could get out through there. The diner's barely five minutes' walk from here."

"Doubt it. Plus, you're in no state for a sprint." 

"Nah, don't worry about it." Ashildr caught herself off guard with how blasé she was to her injury. Must be healing already. "Good stock, me."

Clara stood and faced the wall and it's window, watching as Ashildr struggled to her feet (refusing help). "What about the sword?"

"Come back for it tonight." Ashildr placed her hands on the window and peered out to see if they would have a soft landing. Bushes. Good enough. "This is a holding cell for a holding cell." She placed her hands on the bars and gave them a shake - there was a surprising amount of give. "They were gonna shuttle bus us to another facility overnight because this one is-" with a good jolt, the bars came right out from the wall in Ashildr's hands- "-really quite shit. They're going to shut it overnight - we'll be able to sneak back in and recover my beautiful sidearm and be done." She twisted the bars sideways to bring them in through the window. They made an alarmingly audible thump upon impact with the bed.

Clara stepped up onto the bed. "I'll go first. That way I can catch you before you go chronically messing up those ribs of yours. Deal?"

"Deal."

Clara placed both hands on the windowsill, and stuck her head right out of it. Then, with practised ease, turned back so that she faced away from the window, stuck her arms up, wriggled out, and let fall. She landed in the bushes below.

Ashildr took a breath before following. She took very much the same approach, if somewhat slower. Her ribs weren't happy with her when she reached up. Right above the window were grooves in the rock that you could stick your fingers right in - it was like this prison wanted to be broken out of. Getting her legs out proved to be more difficult as it required quite the serious wiggle; for someone with multiple bruised ribs, this was less than ideal, but neither was prison. Eventually, though, Ashildr had it positioned so that her legs fell straight below her. From here, it was simple - just drop.

Which she did.

Ow.

Clara's catching was less than accurate, but what can you do?   
"You alright?" she asked.

Ashildr nodded. "Run," she said.


	19. You're Going to Get Us Both Arrested

As Albert Einstein once famously said, "I know not with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones." And he was right.

Swords came very much back into popularity after everyone thoroughly mulched each other in the wars of 6,000,000,000 and thereabouts; the proverbial wisdom of a post-apocalyptic universe agreed that personal protection was necessary in amongst nuclear wastelands, but should not hold the ability to destroy a continent. 

It was for these reasons that Ashildr could get away with carrying her newly discovered Ulfbert around with her in the far future: it was commonplace. Ashildr had little memory of the interstellar wars that had stricken the zones she later traversed with Clara, however; she had limited storage in her memory - Clara's soft frame melting into a field of gentle grass was a far preferable image to planets launching nukes at each other. 

In the same vein, the far past also excused the carrying of personal stabby-things, although it often highlighted wealth more than anything. Before the propane forge, swords such as the Ulfbert were, for lack of a better term, a bitch to make - carrying a damascus blade in times when damascus was made by sticking a clay pot full of iron under a bunch of coals was a statement of power. 'Look at me,' it said. 'I'm rich and have a bloody good blacksmith.'

The biggest problem was in the eons between the far past and the far future. Ashildr had seen too much death by this time to ever take joy in a machine designed to kill multitudes of people very swiftly - swords were contained; efficient, but localised; guns and bombs, however, were indiscriminate. Messy. Old wars killed dozens. New ones killed millions. So, even through the deadzone, she continued to carry the sword - things did try to kill her and the missus alarmingly often.

Clara tried to find the humour in it. She really did. However, there are only so many cells you can see before they get dull.

"You should've given the nice armed police officer your sword."

Ashildr pressed her lips together, letting her hand flop against her stomach as she laid on the flat surface masquerading as a bed. The blank roof of the holding cell sneered at her idle mind.

Clara sat below her, near Ashildr's feet, leaning her back against the solid brick of the bed. She had one arm flopped over her knee. Her head was in the other. "I'm telling you," she continued, "that next time we're going out, you're leaving that bloody Ulfbert at home."

Ashildr stayed quiet. She turned her head around to look at Clara. "They didn't have to tackle me, though. I have bruised ribs."

Clara chuckled.

"Oi! I'm in genuine pain!"

"It was quite funny. You went down like a sack of spuds."

"You're such a twat." Ashildr batted Clara around the head playfully. They laughed together for a moment, before Ashildr winced as the pain enveloped her again.

Clara turned around, still smiling but obviously concerned. "Let me have a look," she said.

She shuffled closer to Ashildr's torso. "You alright if I lift your shirt a bit?"

Ashildr nodded but looked away. It doesn't matter if you've been married for centuries, making eye contact with the woman palpating you is always a tad awkward. 

Clara inched the hem of Ashildr's shirt up to reveal the purple bruises blemishing across her ribs. As Clara brushed her fingers across them, Ashildr winced. Her fingers were cold.

"Could you, like, rub your hands together a bit? They're freezing."

"No. Cold hands are your punishment for getting me thrown in yet another prison." She continued to inspect Ashildr's blunt force trauma, apologising when she grunted in pain. "Yeah, that's gonna smart, but you should be alright. Trust your little piece of Mire." Clara kissed Ashildr's forehead as she pulled her shirt back down. When she returned to sitting at the foot of the bed, she passed one arm back around behind her, resting it on the edge of the bed - Ashildr wrapped her fingers around Clara's palm.

They sat in silence for a minute, simply staring into the quiet of the concrete box. Their breathing echoed off the blank, blank walls, coming back to them in clumps of stale exasperation; occasionally, if they were lucky, it wouldn't come back to them at all, instead floating up and out through the window set close to the ceiling.

"Be glad we're not in America," Ashildr offered. "They'd say we're Antifa and lock us up as terrorists."

Clara laughed once, cynical. "Death by the blade of the dispossessed is very anti-fascist." 

"We're not dispossessed, not as such. More... I dunno, what are we?" Ashildr stretched out her legs. These ribs were gonna be fun for six to eight weeks.

"Who cares what we are or aren't?" Clara's teacher voice seemed to turn on and off involuntarily these days. Currently, it was on. "Isn't it more about the pure poetisism of the news report?"

"Poetisism or propaganda?"

Teacher voice switched off again. "Same thing."

Ashildr let her gaze drift to the window. She examined it for a moment before jamming her elbows beneath her and sitting up with a wheeze. "We could get out through there. The diner's barely five minutes' walk from here."

"Doubt it. Plus, you're in no state for a sprint." 

"Nah, don't worry about it." Ashildr caught herself off guard with how blasé she was to her injury. Must be healing already. "Good stock, me."

Clara stood and faced the wall and it's window, watching as Ashildr struggled to her feet (refusing help). "What about the sword?"

"Come back for it tonight." Ashildr placed her hands on the window and peered out to see if they would have a soft landing. Bushes. Good enough. "This is a holding cell for a holding cell." She placed her hands on the bars and gave them a shake - there was a surprising amount of give. "They were gonna shuttle bus us to another facility overnight because this one is-" with a good jolt, the bars came right out from the wall in Ashildr's hands- "-really quite shit. They're going to shut it overnight - we'll be able to sneak back in and recover my beautiful sidearm and be done." She twisted the bars sideways to bring them in through the window. They made an alarmingly audible thump upon impact with the bed.

Clara stepped up onto the bed. "I'll go first. That way I can catch you before you go chronically messing up those ribs of yours. Deal?"

"Deal."

Clara placed both hands on the windowsill, and stuck her head right out of it. Then, with practised ease, turned back so that she faced away from the window, stuck her arms up, wriggled out, and let fall. She landed in the bushes below.

Ashildr took a breath before following. She took very much the same approach, if somewhat slower. Her ribs weren't happy with her when she reached up. Right above the window were grooves in the rock that you could stick your fingers right in - it was like this prison wanted to be broken out of. Getting her legs out proved to be more difficult as it required quite the serious wiggle; for someone with multiple bruised ribs, this was less than ideal, but neither was prison. Eventually, though, Ashildr had it positioned so that her legs fell straight below her. From here, it was simple - just drop.

Which she did.

Ow.

Clara's catching was less than accurate, but what can you do?  
"You alright?" she asked.

Ashildr nodded. "Run," she said.


	20. Random Interactions

"Ash, is that your thirteenth biscuit?"

Ashildr shoved the digestive into her mouth whole. "God is dead."

\----------

"I wish I had theme music that could follow me around and make my life more dramatic," Ashildr announced.

Clara didn't look up from the book in her hands. "It would be the sound of cannons."

"Tchaikovsky was a nice man."

\----------

"I swear to god and all that is holy, if one more of those 'harmless daddy long legs' of yours ends up being a fucking Racnoss again, I'm going to start a riot." Ashildr stared out into space, shuddering and throwing the bowl - cup and A4 was too small, these space arachnids needed a bowl and newspaper - into the sink. 

Clara sat by the bar, watching on. "You're all tough and Viking until the spiders start jumping."

\----------

Clara sat at the laptop, bemused, cup of tea in hand. 

Ashildr witnessed the scene and was filled with existential dread. "What are you doing?" she asked, tentative.

"Reading."

She didn't trust the answer. "Reading what?" 

"Your browser history."

She felt the blood leave her face.

A/N - My browser history now includes both Maisie Williams and Jodie Whittaker swearing which, out of context, is exceedingly difficult to explain 

\----------

"What would you do if I shaved my head?"

"Divorce you."

\----------

"Clara? I got pizza," Ashildr called out into the TARDIS, cradling the box in her arms.

Clara's head poked around the door of the console room. "Brill," she said, rubbing her hands together. She walked through and flipped open the lid. "This is my favourite." A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth, eventually breaking out into a massive grin.

"I know," Ashildr said simply.

"I feel like I'm submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known right now."

Ashildr chuckled and kissed Clara on the forehead.

\----------

Clara pinned Ashildr down by the elbows. "Repent for your sins."

Ashildr laughed and tried to move her nose out from underneath Clara's. "What do you expect me to do? Beg for attrition?"

"I expect you to tell me where you hid the Jammie Dodgers!"

\----------


	21. Thunderstorms

The TARDIS cranked out sometimes. Of course, not often, her being one of the most reliable machines in the history of time and space and all that, but, occasionally, she would stall, or phase, or get stuck somewhere. This was all well and good when she got stuck in a perfect viewing spot for the Spider Nebula or something along that vein, but less so anywhere else.

There were times this could be exploited; ever the optimists, Ashildr and Clara would try and explore every corner they ended up occasionally stranded in. One measly Thursday (at a guess), the diner decided that the ass end of nowhere was the perfect place for a mid-centaury nap, leaving the pair rather stranded. In the rain, rather naturally.

Oh, but it doesn't rain, it pours. In this case, rather quite literally. The thunder cracked open the sky like a hammer to the ice, splitting lightning through the atmosphere, leaving a fizz through the very air. The world around them enveloped in electricity and ash and floods. Oh, the sky, how it burned.

It was destructively poetic.

Such events, such weather, called for exactly one course of action: thick blankets, hot tea, fluffy socks and the arms of the one you hold dear.

The diner's library was a refuge - a haven. Clara and Ashildr would pile onto one of the big, squishy armchairs, half ontop of each other, and listen to the rain. It was well and good until Ashildr put her cold feet on Clara's leg and she screamed.

"We are textbook pragma," Clara threw out. 

Ashildr held her tea under her nose for a second. "Well, yes, I suppose we are."

Clara tucked her arm around Ashildr's waist, tugging her a little closer under the blanket. 

"Hello, you," Ashildr whispered, her voice thick with sleepiness.

Clara smiled and ran her thumb over Ashildr's elbow. "Sleep, dear." She kissed her forehead.

And, in the lashing rain, lulled by the rhythm of the heartbeat of the very world, a love that stretched millennia slumbered beneath the moon; in the light of the stars they had touched, safe in the soft embrace of the dark, time passed them by as the river does the trees. The universe smiled down at them that night, but they barely noticed - Clara was watching dreams dance behind Ashildr's eyes, and, well. Ashildr was asleep.


	22. Time

All of time and all of space. It's a rather large stomping ground. 

The stars sat in the sky, as they always did, in the same spots they always occupied, sprinkling their light out into the sky.

"You know, technically speaking, they're fusion reactors and their light is just a byproduct of the energy expenditure of mass atomic explosions?" 

"Ash, I swear to god, if you don't stop reading my diary entries over my shoulder as I write them, I'm going to divorce you. Also, I'm an English teacher. Physics means nothing to me. The fuck is an atom?"

"You know those diagrams of protons and electrons orbiting neutrons like scale versions of the solar system? Yeah, nothing like that." Ashildr sank into the diner booth, flopping her arm around Clara's shoulders.

"What are they like, then?"

"Nobody knows. We've tried to see but they never behave when being observed, little wankers they are."

One thing Ashildr had never come quite to grips with was the audible nature of Clara's smile; she could hear it, in that moment, in her laugh, in her heartbeat - that damn smile, all teeth and dimples, that called out to the universe like a song. Her fingers were warm as they locked into Ashildr's. 

Ashildr rested her head on Clara's in an embrace so familiar she barely noticed she'd done it. "Why are you so sad?" she whispered.

"I don't know. I can't remember." Her sigh echoed. 

Ashildr was reminded of her children. Names lost, faces forgotten, and nothing but pain in the hole left by the loss of love.

"This is no fun," Clara continued. "You're older than me. What keeps you going?" 

"You."

"Seriously."

"I spent a lifetime waiting. A billion lifetimes waiting. Do you remember when you put your hand on my chest and you listened to my heartbeat, all those years ago? In that moment, I realised who it was for. Not to be dramatic or anything, though." She scratched her head for a moment. How to word this. "It's not like I deserved immortality. Nobody deserves anything. We're just atoms, that's all life is - my turn to use the space dust; and when we're used up and dead, we'll be returned to the skies. We are the stars, Clara, and the stars are us; to look to the heavens and let the beauty of the now be clouded by the nostalgia of the by gone is to fail to appreciate the universe in her infinite glory. I used to see the vastness of space as an obstacle, or something to fear; I was just a stray drop of water in an infinitely large ocean, and that drained me. But the universe and I are one - I am both a drop of water and the entire sea. That thought kept me going." 

"You're prettier than space dust. Unless it's really, really good space dust."

A short silence. "Tell me a story, my love."

The days melted together like this: blurred jokes, Ashildr explaining physics concepts (a bizarre passion she didn't remember picking up), Clara's storytelling - even the darkness of space and the winds of time could not corrode the rigid simplicity of sanctuary in company long kept.


	23. Culture Shocks

Many things passed by the windows of the diner as she sat parked in space. Stars and planets - the big things - as well as the occasional asteroid and other space junk; it was rare but not unheard of to even run into other ships, which Ashildr was never happy about. 

"Come to the far end space to get away from everyone and all you get is people trying to get away from you," she'd mutter. "Typical."

One morning, as Clara stood by the windows, watching time pass her by as she ate her cereal, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other, a funky lil' bit of space junk filted past her. At first, it was unidentifiable, simply a mess of black against the softer dark blue; with no real shape, it was impossible to tie the silhouette to anything solid. Until it started to unravel. Arms, a body, and pearly white eyes staring blindly right at her.

It was a corpse.

She promptly choked on her Cheerios.

Suspended in nothingness and staring dead ahead with all the spite of the underworld. Laying in the vacuum of space. Spending your afterlife putting space-time travellers off their breakfasts. What a way to go.

This poor sod had to have come from somewhere. There was a ship in distress somewhere, there had to be. Maybe they needed help-

Clara felt arms around her waist and jumped up half a foot. Behind her, Ashildr laughed. "Sorry. You got out of bed before I could say 'good morning' properly," she murmured, planting a kiss on Clara's neck.

Unable to respond, Clara simply held eye contact with the stiff. This was horrifying. And maybe just a tiny bit exiting.

"Ah." Ashildr took her head out from Clara's neck. "We're in that part of space. Sorry, dear, I think I left the handbrake off and we've drifted."

"That's a human body out there," Clara whispered, voice hoarse.

"Humanoid. Unfortunately normal for this part of the universe. Sorry you had to see this, my love. Explosive decompression doesn't leave pretty bodies."

"What?"

"This entire galactic quadrant. Technology of Earth's 33rd century but attitudes of its 17th; they launch their dead into space in special corpse canons as a form of burial. Travellers don't usually come here. North Korea of the galaxy, this bit. Try to ignore it." 

The unfocused eyes of the dead man no longer held Clara's - his drift, entirely without course as it was, had taken him right past the window and out of view, but out of sight does not mean out of mind.

In her sleepless nights, Clara would stare out at nothing and feel the nothing stare right back with the eyes of that damned corpse - the worst part was the unshakeable feeling that she should do something.


	24. Bloody Zeus

27th February, 8,542,600,072 (ish)

The ancient Greeks had a myth that people were once creatures with two heads and eight limbs that cartwheeled along the Earth until Zeus became envious and stuck them in two, destined to search for their other half for eternity - I never put any credence in it. To highlight my disbelief would be pointless - I disbelieve every myth: hell, I was there when most of them were written, I even crop up in a few. No, it was more that I disagreed; I always thought that I was whole as an individual - until, of course, I met Clara. 

It felt like slotting right in to another puzzle piece, meeting her, and we fit together so perfectly, without a hitch or a snag. Nothing she would ever do could surprise me, or take me off guard, because I know her so well; sometimes, it feels as if she's an extension of me. I may have been complete before Clara, but I will never be complete after her. If I could have realised, all those years ago, that the myth only made sense to those who have looked in the eyes of the woman stood next to them and read the sentence on their own tongue, perhaps I would not have been so judgemental, but simply relaxed into the idea of eternal matchmaking.

Just this morning I woke to her face above my own. It shone in the manner that only hers does and I watched as her eyes crinkled when she smiled. She's so cute like that. Seeing a creature who projects such a hardened attitude to convince herself she's indestructible be so vulnerable in your presence alerts you to the fragility of the nature of trust. I didn't even realise it was my hand she leant her cheek against until after a moment had passed. This is what the Greeks were on about when they theorised two people in love were actually one subjected to unwitting separation by of a vengeful god - this exact feeling right here.

I am achingly in love with her.


	25. That's... Sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The song here is Careful What You Wish For by Bad Omens if you wanna go have a listen :)

"Ash?" Clara called out into the empty TARDIS. No response. "Ashildr?" 

Clara grumbled to herself and set off through the winding corridors to find her. Ashildr did this periodically; vanished right out of the universe only to reappear an hour or so later and act as if nothing had happened. Most of the time, Clara put it down to a need for space of her own - when you live with someone, you need the alone time.

However, this time, there was an important task in which Clara needed assistance; a duty of incredible difficulty and value; an event which could shake the very cosmos.

Clara couldn't open the pickle jar and needed to borrow Ashildr's sword arm. 

The TARDIS loomed. Unhelpful. Vast. To get lost in these corridors was an easy fall from a cliff you couldn't see coming. Clara was prepared to scower. In fact, she expected it. Ashildr could be anywhere along the meters of corridor or in any one of a dozen rooms. Of course, there were her usual haunts: the control room, their bedroom, the home cinema, and the unnaproved forge (the TARDIS had thrown it out for Ashildr before Clara had had any say in the matter), but all of these turned up empty. Normally, Clara would call and ask where she was, but Ashildr had left her mobile on the counter in the diner, so that wasn't much help.

Just as she was preparing to give up and sit in the lounge with some tea for a bit, a door caught her eye. What's more, a door she didn't recognise. How could she miss an entire room? 

Clara held her hand in front of her, debating whether or not to open the door for a second. Maybe she hadn't noticed it for a reason. Against all her better judgements, ignoring the fear coursing through her and focussing instead on the adrenaline, she took a breath, turned the handle, and gently pushed open the door.

Anticlimax. Not a single threatening thing. She tried very hard not to be disappointed.

The room was small, perhaps the smallest in the TARDIS, barely making two by six meters. The four walls were flat but packed floor to ceiling with post-its in yellow and pink; only the roof and carpet were free from the sea of notes. To the back of the rectangular room were three stairs that led to a half-floor also drowning in post-its. Clara walked straight forward and snapped one of the small squares of paper off the wall. On it read, "Sometimes, like when she holds me down and tickles me until I can't breathe, I remember that we are children gifted eternity."

"Huh." She stuck the post-it back on the wall. "Sounds like something I would say." 

"You did say that."

Clara jumped half out of her skin. Ashildr flashed a brief, apologetic smile; her natural light-footedness meant that she would accidentally stealth-attack Clara at least twice a week. They put it down to the years of being a professional highwayman, although both had their doubts - it is impossible to tell when one picks up their habits when one can remember their life. Obviously this room was L-shaped and the rest of the room had been hidden from view.

Clara blew out a shaky breath. "What exactly is this all?"

"This is mentions of me. From your diaries. I come in here when I get sad, or if we've had a fight, or something to that affect." Ashildr jumped down the stairs, skipping all three, before slinging her arm around Clara's shoulders and planting a kiss on her cheek. "You weren't supposed to know about this place. What's that quote from that song you like?"

"Could you be any less specific?"

They laughed together for a second before Clara turned back to the wall. "I don't remember half of these," she muttered. 

"Not even this one?" Ashildr pointed to a specific post-it halfway up the wall which seemed to retell the story of a planet which had erected statues of the Doctor left right and centre to be worshiped as a deity. Clara shook her head in response: not a trip she recalled, unfortunately. Ashildr shrugged. "That's a shame."

"'You'd be a better memory if no one else forgot,' eh?" 

"That's it! That's the quote!"

Clara watched Ashildr's mindless excitement from the corner of her eye. It didn't matter where they got to, where they'd been or where they were off to, that adorable passion that shone through to create such a genuine joy always made Clara's heart melt. She laughed again and rested her head on Ashildr's shoulder.


	26. Land and Time

Clara glanced down at her boots quickly before fixing her eyes on the horizon again. Ashildr came up beside her, slipping Clara's fingers between her own. Around them, the trees whispered their secrets to one another - their quiet rustle filled the silence with a pleasant white noise that stood as a backdrop for the birdsong; all together, the music of the planet fell through the air, warming the sharp edges left by winter as time trudged on into spring. Clara stared out across the planet she had called home once upon a time. She smiled a gentle smile.

"Why are you so sad, Clara?" Ashildr asked. 

"How did you know?"

"That smile, Clara. That's your sad smile."

Clara hated how very perceptive Ashildr could be. "It's this planet," she said. "It's my home. Sometimes I wish that it wasn't populated by caitiffs. We are standing on what will one day be London. There was a poem, y'know; 'If you listen closely to the whisper of the trees,  
'And take the time for the secrets of the breeze,  
'You can still hear the calling of nature's sweet hand,  
'And still feel the magic not yet bled from the land.' Right here, right now, none of that magic is gone. And you don't have to listen to hear the wind, it stands out against the silence. Some people still feel this land's pulse even after it's been pulped."

"I still feel it."

"You feel the heartbeat of the land, Ash, because you are the land. These trees beat in your heart."

Clara continued to watch Ashildr's face as she gazed out onto the fields that would one day be skyscrapers. The emptiness she'd fought since her death was batted away in these tiny moments; in the way Ashildr's hair danced softly in the wind, the slight changes in posture from clear of mind to pensive, the peace in her face as she slept. They could destroy all of the beauty spots in the galaxy and Clara would have nothing to say as long as no harm befell her Ash.


	27. He Was Not A Very Nice Man

Another round of vibrato shots rang out across the wasteland. Ashildr used her torso to cover Clara's head as they crouched behind the barrel, shots pinging off of it.

"That was it, that should be it, his magazine's empty," Ashildr whispered in the shattering silence that followed.

Click. Slide.

"That's cheating! He's brought more amo! He's not allowed to do th-"

She was cut off by more rippling shots.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," the assassin called out, sing-song. "Daddy's got plans for you."

Clara shifted her weight slightly. She was fighting back a smile. She raised her eyebrows once at Ashildr, and then went to stand up.

Ashildr blanked. Acted out of pure instinct. She stood alongside her, throwing her body in front of Clara's with barely a thought, tacking her to the ground as she did so. Pain slashed through her. She felt as if a hole had been ripped through her stomach. It burned it at the edges, screamed through her, felt like all fire and sulfur and hell. The only thing she could process was Clara laid beneath her, splattered with red.

"Clara, you're covered in blood."

"It's not mine."

"But, that means-"

She placed her hand on her stomach, right where the pain burned brightest, and felt the warm stickiness that was almost familiar. She stared down at her hand, almost bemused.

"Hey, look," she said, pushing two fingers together. "I've been shot!"

And then everything went dark.

\--

Ashildr didn't come to until hours later. She stared at the old friend of her bedroom ceiling, feeling completely removed from all feeling in her body. She turned her head to one side to see Clara sat on a chair beside the bed with head in her hands. She reached a tentative hand out and brushed her fingers along Clara's wrists gently.

"You're awake," she said.

"What happened to the guy?" Ahildr made a crude trigger-pulling motion with one finger. "The, uh, shooty one."

"He died." Clara's voice was short. Harsh. She spoke with more venom than Ashildr thought possible.

"How?"

Clara met Ashildr's eyes. They blazed with an unseen fury that was almost scary. 

"He just did."

"I didn't think you had it in you."

"I was faced with the possibility of losing you. Do you seriously disbelieve that would make me capable of anything?"

Ashildr went to sit up and immediately regretted it. Her stitches tugged at her flesh underneath the bandages that allowed minimal movement; she glanced down at her stomach to see splotches of red already peeking through. Best not move, then. 

She took a minute to catch her breath. "Lay with me."

"I have things to be do-"

"Please?"

The chair squeaked as Clara stood. There was no attempt to conceal her disapproval, none at all; instead, she simply positioned herself carefully around the hole blown through Ashildr's side and locked her arms around her torso. The behaviour was recognised and gratefully accepted: Clara's arms were positioned as such that nothing could ever come between them, no harming force could ever break the impenetrable ring of steel. Safe and warm, Ashildr drifted off into the nothingess that waited at the bottom of whatever drug she had been given.


	28. For the Glory of the British Empire

Miss Clara Oswald sweeping along the halls of a Victorian manor house in full corset and skirts was enough to make Ashildr weak at the knees. She almost floated; nothing but a ghost, almost impossible, all air and grace. When asked for the definition of beauty, this was the image that must surely enter the mind of every sentient being in the universe. Brown eyes melting in the soft sunlight that flitted gently through the windows, soft edges blurring into definition around the shadows, and a moral longevity that shone onto a face so perfect it had started wars. Ashildr had decided long ago that her final breath would be drawn in protection of this such anomaly. 

Clara continued down the corridor until she threw herself into Ashildr's arms and laughed brazenly. The pair smiled at each other for a moment before Clara broke the silence.

"Shall we have a look around?"

Victorian Edinburgh loomed. The engine of the British empire, the driving force behind the monstrosities of colonialism, all right there to be prodded and enjoyed by the eye of the voracious time traveller. To miss it would be a crime. Ashildr smiled, took Clara's hand, and dragged her laughing out into the streets. 

\--

Throughout the day, everything was swell. Edinburgh turned out to be just as impressive as promised, even if not quite what they were wanting (Ashildr had been aiming for London). 

"Why didn't we land in London?" Ashildr asked at around midday, eying a bowler hat in a shop window. 

Clara hung off her arm, head on her shoulder. "Well, there's a version of me kicking around Victorian London."

"I'm sorry, is this a story I should have heard?"

"Oh, threw myself into the time winds, got blown apart into a million shadows to follow the Doctor across his entire time stream and stop him from being murdered. Basically just your average Tuesday."

Ashildr snorted and pulled away from the window. She shook her head at herself, almost smiling, before heading off again and pulling Clara along with her  
.  
And then, of course, the sun set, and the city began to draw to a slumber; shops began to close, the people disparced, and the cobbles glinted in the perpetual damp of Scotland. In a disapointingly normal fashion, policemen armed with trugdens and overconfidence started to patrol, shooing the homeless and the poor away. 

"What are they doing?" Clara whispered as she watched an officer approach a street urchin.

Ashildr scratched her head. "Where there's industry, there's filth. They're not wanted. Curfew's at nine." 

The police officer picked up a street urchin by the filthy shirt, holding him up at shoulder height and glaring. Before Ashildr could suggest they do something, Clara was already legging it up to the poor child. Ashildr, a second behind, took a moment to process and then started towards them herself.

The police officer held his trudgen underneath the small boy's chin. The small boy held his gaze at the officer's eyes.

Clara was obviously trying to sweet talk to officer, but he was having none of it. Ashildr hurried up to them, cleared her throat, and addressed the brute directly.

"He's a chimney sweep of our household, sir," she said quickly. "We shall give him board for tonight."

The officer took in Ashildr quickly before placing the urchin down. "Keep him off the streets." He placed his trudgen back in his belt before wandering back off down the darkened alley, whistling hymns to himself as he went. 

"Thanks, miss," the urchin said, dusting off his shirt. His spindly arms were covered in scars. The clothes he wore were battered and made mostly of tears; the true colour of his shirt was hidden under layers of filth, his trousers too small and shoes too big. His tiny, bony face was hidden under the mud that coated his skin, and his teeth, yellowed and jutted, forced him into a slight lisp. He turned to face Clara. "If you don't mind my saying, miss, you don't half talk funny."

Clara shrugged. "I'm a woman out of my time."

The urchin glanced at Ashildr, almost for translation. She shook her head at him and ruffled his hair a little. "Do you have a home to get to?"

"Of sorts. Yous gonna come with me? There's room for yous." He looked at Ashildr for confirmation. She shrugged and he erupted into a toothy grin, dusted himself off again, and disappeared off down a side road. 

The women behind barely kept up with him as he weaved in and out through the ever-tighter streets. He skittered across the cobbles in his clown shoes with surprising skill; he'd probably been doing this for the whole of his slimy life.

Eventually, he took them to a door hidden in a wall nobody cared about, and pushed it open.

"This is where we live. Where we go after curfew," he said.  
Behind the door was darkness. In the flittering candlelight, Ashildr could just make out the general shape of the room: the walls arched over in a semi-circle, meeting the rough floor at either side. The smell wafting off of the hundred or so homeless people huddled on the floor was almost overwhelming.

"It ain't much,"the urchin said, "but it's a place to sleep away from danger."

Clara immediately headed to the centre of the room where all the children sat together. She crouched down next to them.

"The funny lady. Is she your missus?" the urchin asked, nodding at Clara. He dragged a filthy sleeve under his nose.

"Excuse me?"

"Don't worry, miss, we get all sorts down 'ere. Ain't nobody gonna care if she is." He pointed at a thin man leaning against one of the sloping brick walls. "Old Peter o'er there, he fancies men. We don't understand, but that don't mean we give 'im to the magistrate. We ain't got nothing down here, see, miss, not even the sun. We start turnin' on one another, we're as good as dead."

Ashildr glanced at the urchin again, careful, before feeling her gaze drift back to Clara. "Yeah," she sighed. "Yeah, she's my missus. How could you tell?"

The urchin broke into a fit of coughing. He was bent over double, handkerchief over his nose and mouth. When he stopped, he looked at it briefly, and then folded it over to cover up the blood. He apologised. "Doctor who came 'round said I got ter- ta-"

"Tuberculosis?"

"Aye, that's it. But it's the way you look at her, miss. The way you look at that funny lady when you think she can't see you. It's like you're scared she'll dissolve when you look away."

Ashildr looked again at the urchin and was suddenly filled with an overwhelming pity; he was hardly a child, eight years old at most, yet carried himself and his responsibility as an adult. He had to. In these streets of grime, he lived in the filth he was seen to be: his disease was no horror story, no cautionary tale, simply the next to be added to the pile of bodies in the corner nobody of stock grieved for. He was unimportant, dying, wise beyond his years and aged from trauma, and, yet, every single person in these cesspits knew his name, and they would all grieve. He ran this city. This city ran Britian. Britian ran the world. He was the most important boy in human history, as every one of his friends was, but they would never know. Here, in the dark, half drowning in his own blood, this small child was to die for the glory of the British empire. Their names would be on no plaque; in fact, their names might never be known.

Ashildr blanched.

"You alright, miss?" 

From across the dingy basement, Clara erupted in laughter. The sound alerted Ashildr immediately, and her head snapped around. Ashildr's mood disintegrated. If there was anything that could pull her from her darkest reverie, it was that beautiful sound. "You should go over to her, kid. She's teaching the others how to read."

\--

"Not sure what they thought of us being, well, an us in there." Clara unlocked the door of the diner as Ashildr stood a few paces back, hands in pockets. "Probably think we're sinners, or something."

"Clara, if loving you is a sin, I rejoice in heracy. Eternity in hell is worth the briefest of moments with you. Besides, history's a lot gayer than they want you to think. Trust me, I lived through it."

"Sappho was a bit before your time, wasn't she?"

"We have a time machine. Nothing is before our time."


	29. Mummy on the Great Western Railway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Violence/Knives

Trains, in all their forms, Ashildr was adamant of, were magnificent. Clara, having been a commuter on the tube, was far less convinced. For Ashildr, trains had been the welcome escape from the long hours spent journeying from one place to another; she couldn't remember quite why - although she guessed she'd made the pledge when they were still a new and fun technology - but she had promised herself that she would ride every line, start to finish, at least once. When the line was something that would turn up on some televison show about the magnificence of Indian engineering, or a demonstration of some of the fiercest physics ever seen (the kind of thing a middle aged dad who worked in the sciences would watch and get exited about), this wasn't so bad; however, when it was the Great Western Railway's 11:26 from Cowbridge to Newgate or something silly like that, she thought about giving up. As trains went from being the pinnacle of the 1800's to the subject of commuters' bellyaching, they did, regrettably, lose their sexiness.

Under her stark black knee-length trench coat, and concealed by the table, Ashildr held her Ulfbert. Whilst not accepted practise to carry a sword on the train in the 20th century - and without Clara's knowledge, for she would almost certainly disapprove - she deemed it necessary; any old creature could be kicking around the place. It was nothing if not precautionary. 

But everything was quiet. An hour into the journey and Clara hadn't yet let go of Ashildr's hand as they watched, mindlessly, the trees pass them by. 

Clara passed her free hand around Ashildr's elbow and laid her head down on her shoulder. "Maybe I judged these train rides too harshly," she said, her gentle smile brightening the whole of the county. "Maybe we should be relaxing in our old age."

Clara shared a glance and a chuckle with her momentarily. Across the aisle, she caught a man looking at them with slight confusion. Clara laughed slightly harder - she forgot she looked more like twenty-five than.... However old she was. She'd lost track a while ago. They both had. There was no need to count it.

The fields because slightly greener as they passed - something that made sense as the rain started to patter down onto the glass of the windows. Wordlessly, having felt her shiver, Clara slipped off her hoodie and passed it to Ashildr, who took it without thinking and slipped it over her shoulders. She stood slowly, trailing her hand back as to not untangle their fingers.

"I'm gonna go get a cuppa. You want anything?" 

"Ooh. Have they got any biscuits?"

"I'll see." 

Walking along a moving train with some semblance of dignity is something that no number of years on this planet or the next could ever prepare you for. Clara held the backs of the seats as she made her way down the carriage to steady herself against the bucking underneath her. The passing thought of her health for her age was one she entertained with humour; she dread to think what her knees would be like if they felt the years. 

It was only natural for the refreshment trolly to be on the complete other extreme of the train to where they were sitting - and in use. 

A man stood at the trolly, facing away from Clara; he was bent head and shoulders over it, humming slightly and making a mug of coffee. His stature was eerily familiar, yet just out of reach. Those sharp shoulders, the matted hair, the feeling of unease his casual nature cast around him. The stink of his immorality that filled the room.

Clara tried not to think about it - how many creepy men were on trains? Too many to count. It was probably nothing.

Something about that "probably" wasn't all too reassuring.

It wasn't like she could trust her memory.

Apart from on that face.

The man had turned around to face Clara. She stared up at him, mind racing between rage and terror, before eventually settling on one thought: Ashildr.

She turned quickly on her heel and nearly ran back down the aisle. She listened for him behind her, hoping against all hopes he hadn't recognised her. Frantic. Heart pounding. Rushing of blood in her ears. Rage. Pain. Curiosity. 

Now is not the time.

She busted back in to the carriage. The man sat across from Ashildr looked like he had been rudely awakened from his reverie. Ashildr found it amusing. Clara couldn't care.

"No biscuits, then?" she asked, her voice cheery. Oh, she had no idea.

Clara slung herself into the seat next to her and turned her whole body to face the window. She was careful to ensure that Ashildr had no direct line of sight to the door.

"Ash, he's here." Her whisper was low, intense and so fast her words half blurred together. "The man who shot you."

Ashildr's brow raised with surprise, and then furrowed again. "Hang on," she whispered back, "didn't you kill him?"

"Obviously not thoroughly enough."

The breaks squealed as the train pulled in to a station. Clara wasn't sure which one - she had other things on her mind. 

She made a snap decision. "We're getting off here. We'll find some way back to the TARDIS-"

The man who had been sat across from them had pulled his bag onto his shoulders and was headed for the sliding doors of the carriage. Clara pulled Ashildr to her feet and was about to follow, but the passenger thanked an unseen figure as he left, and, as Clara went to lead them on their way out, she found herself cut off by the same man from the trolly.

Clara felt Ashildr's hand tighten around her own.

The man outstretched an arm and motioned the table. "Please," he said, condescending voice sickly, "sit." He flashed a repulsive smile that didn't reach his eyes. No, no. All those cold green eyes betrayed was sadism.

Clara weighed her options. They'd never get past him, he was too wide; they wouldn't win in a fight, either. Two tiny women against a brute of easily six and a half feet? Those weren't good odds. That and there was the knife he had stuck into his jeans. He made a show of pushing his jacket back as he pocketed his hand. By the outline, it was at least seventeen inches. Bit excessive for a train ride to Newgate. 

Clara squeezed Ashildr's hand once as a way of telling her to sit down without taking her eyes off him. She backed into the seats behind them, still keeping his gaze fixed. The man sat down across from them and slouched into the chairs. 

"Forgive the hardware," he said, pulling it out and laying it deliberately across the table. "Don't mind if I leave it there, do you? Gets awfully uncomfortable."

Clara reached out under the table and rested her hand on the knee of Ashildr's that was farthest away, thus putting herself between her and the man who had made an attempt on her life.

"Don't worry about it." Ashildr feigned nonchalance. "Don't mind if I do the same?" She pulled her Ulfbert out of her belt and rested it, scabbard and all, next to the knife. "First things first. Who are you?"

The man's face twisted with contempt for a second. His cold eyes grew almost reptilian. "I'm Jeremiah. I keep telling you that."

"There wasn't much chat last time we met. It was mostly shooting, if I recall."

"I'm sorry I missed."

"I'm not," Clara cut in. "What do you want?"

"Like you don't know."

His composure snapped. Gone was the mask of the calculating killer, so aware of both him and his victims, leaving only the child beneath; his arrogance shone from his distrust and his sleezy, backwards morals of revenge and twisted snarl screamed from the rooftops: look. It's my weakness.

He studied Clara's eyes for a moment, façade restored. "You really don't know. You are a heartless bitch."

Ashildr jerked forward. If it wasn't for Clara's arm, she would have torn his throat out. Ashildr's fingers wrapped themselves slowly around Clara's wrist. Neither needed words to agree that this guy wouldn't be a stain on either's conscience. 

"Listen." He picked up his knife and slid it out of its sheath. He trained the point on Clara. "I am going to kill your pretty little wife here and I'm gonna make you watch. She is going to scream and writhe and all you're gonna be able to do is beg for me to stop, but I won't."

Clara was about ready to take a shot at him herself. Bile rose in her throat.

"Oh, when's that? We might have plans." Ashildr acted completely unbothered, but, through her wrist, Clara could feel her pulse thundering through her fingertips. She didn't know if it was terror or fury. 

Clara stood from the table and smiled. "This is our station."

Without more than a second's warning, Jeremiah had leapt from the table, knife still in hand, and was headed straight for Clara. He pushed his elbow across her throat and her back up against the window of the train. He held the tip of his knife against her stomach. She could feel it through her clothes. Her feet were a good two inches off the floor. Her hands went immediately to his arm, trying desperately to get some of her weight off her jugular. 

Ashildr's sword sang as she unsheathed it. The man arched his back as she pushed the tip into his spine.

"Here's how the story goes," Ashildr said, using her most severe tone. "You're going to put Clara down and let the two of us get off this train when we pull into the station, or I'm going to run this through you so slowly and with such great precision that you feel each of your organs burst."

He made no effort to move.

Until Ashildr pushed her sword in further. He grunted, arched his back, and dropped Clara back to the ground.

She landed with a soft thud and a not-so-soft heave. The train slowed and stopped. The man picked up the sheath of his knife and opened up the carriage doors. He looked back over his shoulder to see Clara draped over Ashildr as she kneeled, cracked a smile, waved with his knife, and stepped off the train.

"He really is very rude," Clara said between wheezes.


	30. Daylight Robbery

Light played in front of Ashildr's eyelids. She eased then open with disdain; it felt like a job of work, so mightily were the thralls of sleep clinging to her. 

Until her eyes found a rather shirtless Clara at the foot of the bed - suddenly, closing her eyes seemed like the harder option. 

Clara looked around and caught Ashildr's gaze. "Morning, you!" She pulled a t-shirt over her head - disapointingly - before making her way around to the side of the bed and kissed Ashildr gently good morning. "I'm gonna go make some breakfast. Try and be up and dressed - I have a plan for today."

"Ominous."

Clara winked. 

"Hey, hey, before you go, could I ask a favour? Lay on me with your whole weight."

Clara studied Ashildr briefly before outwardly shrugging and clambering on top of her wife. Ashildr groaned a little and laughed, but otherwise enjoyed the experience; it had been a while since someone had crushed her like this. She missed the feeling.  
"Can you breathe down there?"

"Not really."

"Do you want me to move?"

Ashildr locked her arms around Clara's back. "No."

Neither made any attempt to move for a moment, both just enjoying the contact, before Clara rolled off.

"C'mon," she said. "I've got something for you. Come on in to the dining area."

"If it's not breakfast, I'm divorcing you." Ashildr pulled a hoodie off of the floor before even thinking about thrusting herself into the morning chill of the bedroom. 

Eventually, she made it to the dining area, where Clara stood leaning against a display case. It was almost as tall as she was, rectangular, with drawers sat beneath a glass sheet covering a sword rack. It was a deep mahogany, engraved with runes around the edges; the handles were tiny, intricate wolves' heads of polished silver, glinting ever so slightly in the red light of the morning sun cast through the windows behind.

"I thought, maybe, you could keep your Ulfbert in here," Clara said, tapping the top with stray fingers.

Ashildr forgot to reply. She simply stared. "This is so cool!"

Clara smiled.

The door to the diner thudded open. Both Clara and Ashildr jumped slightly and turned about to watch as the 'customer' came in.

"Let me guess," they said, in a voice both instantly recognised, "you're not open for business today."

It was Clara. Ashildr blinked. Looked behind her to her Clara. Looked in front of her to another Clara.

Oh, this can't be good.

From across the room, the new Clara locked eyes with Ashildr and her entire demeanour changed. Her shoulders slumped, face slipped into that sad smile, and her eyes widened. She seemed so incredibly sad. 

Without any sort of warning whatsoever, the future Clara took meaningful strides across the linoleum towards Ashildr. Once within reach, she stretched out both arms and took a gentle hold on her shoulders. Clara then moved one soft hand to Ashildr's cheek and, surprisingly, kissed her.

This wasn't like their normal kisses. This wasn't casual, general affections, but such a concoction of so many emotions she couldn't quite tell which way was up. There was the solidity of it all - the way Clara held Ashildr to her, the way she made no move to pull away - on top of the release of it all. It felt like Clara hadn't done this in a very long time. And, underneath it all, was the sadness; staining the affections was the aching feeling like this would be the last time.

Eventually, Ashildr had to push Clara away with her fist - not only was she hyper aware of the other Clara stood less than three feet away but she also needed to breathe.

"You always do forget I need air," Ashildr laughed. She was sure this woman was her Clara - nobody else had ever kissed her like that in all her years. When she looked into her eyes, she saw much more than she bargained for; instead of the usual playful sparkle, they were dull and held more pain than she had ever seen. It was like she held all the sorrow of every sentient being in vats of misery right inside her head. Ashildr felt her fingers linger in this Clara's palm.

Present Clara stepped forward. "Am I missing something?"

The other Clara seemed to not hear her until a moment later, so fixated was she on Ashildr ahead of her. Finaly, a beat too late, she cleared her throat and looked toward Present Clara. 

"I'm you. From your future."

"How far in my future?" 

Future Clara spread her hands. She glanced at Ashildr again. "I'm really not... Sure. Sorry. Uh, right. I'm so sorry to burst in on you guys like this."

Ashildr twisted her fingers around Future Clara's hand and squeezed gently; whichever way you looked at it, this woman was still her wife, and was still in pain. She was happy to help.  
Present Clara was far less lenient. 

"I'm sure that I'll understand when I come to do it," she said. "A word?"

Future Clara hesitated at the idea of leaving Ashildr's direct company. However, when Clara jerked her head towards the console room, she followed; Ashildr supposed that non-verbal communication is easier when it's between you and yourself.

Her presence was unwanted in the silence that followed their departure.

\--  
  
It was probably around an hour later that the Claras eventually emerged. 

Whatever had turned Future Clara's eyes into the empty pits of despair, it was contagious. Present Clara's eyes had darkened over the hour, too. Both Claras headed directly towards Ashildr as she perched on her barstool; Future Clara came right up beside her and buried her hand in her hair. Present Clara stood awkwardly out of the way. Ashildr contemplated the hand that rested at the nape of her neck. It was by no means unfamiliar, alien, or, in fact, unwanted; it simply sat where it felt as it always had. Future Clara gazed steadily down at her.

"I should be off," Future Clara muttered, almost as if she didn't want to be heard; her dead eyes still had not left Ashildr.

Present Clara clasped her hands behind her back. "Yeah. It's best." She avoided her own eyes.

Future Clara sighed, almost as if she understood her avoidance of herself. What had she done?

Ashildr stood from the stool. Future Clara's hand migrated to her cheek; Ashildr felt herself lean into it slightly. She saw as the Claras exchanged a glance before Future Clara leant in and kissed her again.

This interaction was different. It was slower, kinder, and more tinged with the longing of loss that terrified them both. Without another word, Future Clara left through the diner doors. She didn't even look back.

In the whirlwind peace that followed, Clara swept Ashildr into her arms. "Ash, I'm worried."

"Technically, I didn't kiss anyone else-"

"No, Ashildr, I am... Worried."

Clara's stark tone and firm hold on Ashildr made the meaning of her words sink in.

"That Clara hadn't seen you in so long. Maybe hundreds of years. Everything I fear is right there in her eyes. Please." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "We cannot let that happen to us."  
"You know that I will be with you to my dying breath, right? You understand that naught can pull me from you?"

Ashildr heard the terror that soaked Clara's voice. "What if it's not our choice?"

The dread followed them from that moment on.


	31. Chapter 31

"I once woke up in a swamp, covered in moss and severely hypothermic, with nothing but a Hoizer song playing in my head." Ashildr spun herself around on the office chair with her foot. 

Clara erupted in laughter from where she sat, on the floor, in the corner of the room. 

"You should have seen the faces of the poor nurses who had to deal with me at A&E when I said I'd been laid in a bog for a week."   
Clara was still laughing. 

"My girlfriend at the time called me Shrek for six months."

Clara had finally regained her composure. She sat covered in biscuit crumbs on the floor of the office (that they never saw the point in having as neither ever actually did any work). Perhaps the TARDIS held onto the room for nights just like this one - when the careless owners would stumble home slightly giddy from their travels and sit with a frankly ungodly amount of custard creams. Perhaps the TARDIS held onto the room as a subtle hint that they should probably be trying to earn some from of money as Ashildr did need to eat. Either way, it was a prime location for the swapping of dumb stories. 

Ashildr stood from her office chair, crossed the room, and plonked herself down next to her wife. "Of course, medical records around me were hazy. They thought there was a mistake because I had entries on the NHS from the 1960's and this was, like, 2100 or something stupid. 'I think someone has mistaken you for your great grandmother,' they said. 'You do look so alike.'" 

"Bog Woman of the 22nd century is alive and wants a kebab," Clara stuck on.

Their laughter filled the room again, pushing the ceiling slightly higher. Ashildr pulled one knee up to her chest and rested her elbow on it; Clara saw this as an opportunity to shift as so she sat between Ashildr's legs, facing her side-on, and leanied her back against Ashildr's raised leg. 

They sat in contemplative silence for a long time. Ashildr's mind floated from one inconsequential thought to another until she fell asleep and with a mind full of pleasant nothingness.


	32. Chapter 32

One of the many helpful attributes attained through time travel was that of pretending to be utterly flummoxed by a question you in fact know the answer to.

"Is 2020 eventful?"

"Oh, I don't know. Never really- been..."

(This also doubled-up for intrusive questions from straight people. 

"Who's the guy in the relationship?"

"Well, I open the jars when Clara can't, if that's what you're asking.")

Blagging it also came in handy when questions they should have known the answers to but didn't came up. 

And strange teenage boys.

It was as close to a normal day as Clara and Ashildr got when they ran into him. Wednesday local time, late afternoon; summer, sometime - the sun was still slung above the horizon despite the hour. 

He sat, contemplative, on a wall. His cable headphones stuck out of a Five-Finger Death Punch t-shirt and fell from his ears either side of an ashen face. His back was hunched, knees on his elbows, feet on the ground. He was closed off. As Clara and Ashildr drew closer to him, they saw his sunken eyes and the size of the bags beneath them. His entire demeanour was diminished; it was as if he had nothing left in the world to him and was determined to take whatever he could in return. 

He spotted the women from across the street and fixed them with his dead eyes. Both felt the gaze from across the street and stopped to return it. Slowly, the boy pulled a headphone out of his ear. His face contorted into an emotion entirely implacable; his eyebrows furrowed into the edge of a scowl, throwing his eyes further beneath the hood of his eye sockets. He stood from his wall. His movements were calculated. Almost clever. He drew no attention to himself whilst commanding that only he was looked at. Clara felt the rest of the street fall from around her. She had the nagging sensation that she knew him - as impossible as that was.

Naturally, she saw a hate crime on the horizon. She let her hand fall from Ashildr's.

The boy moved forward and into the middle of the road, where he stood for an uncomfortable length of time. He didn't move, didn't make any sound. He just stood. Ashildr edged towards him, eventually stilling a respectful distance from him. Clara followed gingerly; up close, she could really see the tiredness behind the dead eyes and the trauma etched deep in his face. The expression she had found so difficult to place before suddenly put its name in lights: rememberence. 

Yet that only hid a second emotion. His rage burned inside of him at a ferocity unimaginable in one so young. This boy had a mind decades older than his body would live to be.

"I thought you two would be dead by now," he said finally. His tone was not of joking friendliness, inquiry, or surprise - simply disdain.

Clara's mind flashed back to the train ride from hell and the words of her future self. "Trust me, there's people working on it."

The boy tilted his head to the side. His anger simmered below the surface, perhaps exacerbated by his age and the world telling him he was increasingly futile. Clara recognised it; she'd seen it so many times in teaching. 

The boy smiled to himself. "At least some have virtue in this world."

Ashildr instinctively positioned herself so that her shoulder was slightly in front of Clara's. Clara stepped out from behind her.

"Do we know you?" she asked.

"You have chosen this hill to die on and watched it crumble beneath your feet. I admire your consistency. Or deplore your elitism, depending on your politics."

He continued to stare them down with his empty eyes. The air around them turned frigid as the evening descended into night. Both parties appeared to be waiting on the other one to speak or move, although neither did; Ashildr itched to leave, Clara could sense it, but Clara's instinct screaming at her to run was drowned out by experience telling her to not reveal the fear that had her heart pounding against her ribs. 

Something was coming.

Pieces were falling into a puzzle to reveal a picture she really did not like.

Things were so awfully wrong.

This was an opportunity to find out why.

The boy sighed and began to walk along the road. Clara and Ashildr glanced at eachother, surprised at the sudden change of tone, before Ashildr jolted to follow him.

"What was your name?" she called after him.

"You're doing a very good job of pretending you don't know."

"That's because we don't."

The boy turned around, as of he had only just started to believe that they were ignorant of who he was. "Jeremiah." 

He disappeared around the corner of the road with nothing but his final words and the foreboding ice of the night hanging in the air behind him.


	33. Night Terrors

White. Blinding. Is this the light?

No, no, now she's falling. Falling past sulfur, and flame; what is this? What is this around her? Hell. This is hell. She's falling to hell. Scratches on the stone walls. Scratches. Bleeding nails. Haven't slowed. Hell. Why was she here? She can't remember. No.

Dead. She's dead.

Ashildr snapped her eyes open. Her breathing was laboured against her pillow. Christ. Christ. She stuck an arm out beside her, searching for Clara, and her heart dropped when it met empty bed. She pulled herself into sitting up and stared blankly into the empty room. 

She rubbed her eyes. Pulled a hoodie over her shoulders. She still felt empty inside, shaken beyond recognition of even herself by her nightmare. Her legs trudged her, zombie-like, along the twisting corridors to the library. The door was ajar.

Inside, Clara sat hunched over a tome on Ashildr's normal chair. On the desk in front of her was a lamp throwing a feeble light in a small circle around the room. Beyond that fragile shell of light, the world did not exist. 

As the door creaked shut, Clara jumped. She wiped her face quickly and placed the book on the table.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?"

Ashildr shook her head feebly. Her legs continued to move her towards Clara until she eventually collapsed half on top of her in the chair. Before she really knew what was going on, she was sobbing into her chest.

Clara simply held her. 

"Sorry," Ashildr managed to choke out. "Sorry-"

Clara shushed her gently. "You're allowed to have emotions, hon. What's gone on?"

Ashildr wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "I can't shake this feeling that something's coming for us."

Clara pulled Ashildr towards her chest again and held her there until she had stopped shaking.

"Let it come," she said. "I won't let anything happen to you."

Clara's words barely penetrated the fog that had descended over Ashildr's mind.  



	34. Sword Girl Pretty

One of the many TARDIS rooms that Clara spent significantly less time in than her wife was the forge. Despite the sword left to her and prior experience, it was not something she enjoyed beyond casual necessity. Ashildr, however, had been spending an increasing amount of time in this one particular spot.

The entire room smelled like blood. Clara wasn't sure if that was the sheer amount of metal in it or if Ashildr was sustaining injuries during her time there. The room was reasonably sized, rectangular, and cold. At one end, shrouded in the grey wall, was a propane forge, anvil, and a bunch of other things Clara didn't really understand. Tools littered a workbench along with half carved axe-heads and the occasional spear. Fastened to the stone walls were different weapons of all sorts - traditional Viking shields, throwing axes, and swords in so many varieties it was frankly dizzying. At the other end was the training area. Straws of hay littered the floor, broken by slashes through them obviously left by Ashildr's boots as they scraped across the floor. Three target dummies - sacks filled with hay and shaped into men - stood in the centre. Their faceless heads guarded the room, careful, unseeing and yet omniscient. When Clara walked in, the middle one had a slash right across his chest, starting at the right shoulder and heading down towards the left hip. 

Ashildr sat on a wooden bench off to the the side; resting on her one knee, elevated, was the hilt of her Ulfbert, with the tip dropping down to rest on her other, lowered knee. In one hand, she held the sword steady, and the other what appeared to be a stone. She scraped the stone along the edge of the blade, occasionally holding it up to the industrial lights and grunting approvingly. She barely even moved her head when Clara came in.

"Sorry," she muttered, more to the sword than Clara. "Needed a sharpen." She held the sword up to the light once more, watching the way the light danced off the steel. Or something else. Clara had no idea what she was actually looking for.

"Looks plenty sharp to me," Clara remarked, looking past Ashildr to the target she had minced.

Ashildr followed her gaze - the first time her eyes had left her sword - and then shook her head. "Nah, you can see," she said, motioning with the sword, "the edges of the cuts are frayed."

Clara approached the dummy and inspected it closely. Sure enough, the edges of the fabric across either side of the cut had stray strands poking out slightly, but the longest couldn't have been half a centimetre.

"Shows the blade's catching. Sawing instead of slicing." She swung the sword around once, taking it up and almost over her shoulder before bringing it down again. 

Clara was ever so slightly aroused. 

She still moved out of the way, though.

Ashildr positioned herself in front of the target that had left hay spilling across the floor. Her left hand covered her right on the hilt. Noiselessly, and with barely any visible movement, like a cobra striking, she lunged forward and plunged the sword right the way through the remaining shoulder of the dummy. Using her left arm for momentum, she spun her own shoulder and twisted her entire body off to the side before pulling her arm back and slicing right through the shoulder of the dummy. Without even acknowledging what she had done, she turned herself back around and felt the cuts with her left hand.

"Much better. Much cleaner."

She spun the sword once around in her palm before returning it to a set of brackets on the wall. 

Clara stood stunned for a moment. Of course, she'd seen Ashildr fight with a sword before, but never during a time when she hadn't had her own shit to be dealing with, and certainly not at a time when the collar Ashildr's short sleeved shirt had slipped down to reveal not only collarbone on one side but bicep on the other.

For that sweet moment, Clara was sixteen again, overcome with the thought, girl pretty. 

She watched motionless as Ashildr's arms flexed as she wiped the grease off her hands with a rag. 

"What?" Ashildr finally asked.

"Sword woman pretty," Clara choked.

"I could take your head off in many fun and innovative ways, my Clara, and the word you use is pretty?" 

-

"You know what," Ashildr said, tucking in closer to Clara's bare side, "I think that's the best sex we've had in decades."

Clara chuckled and raised her arm up as to plant her hand behind her head. "I think I agree."

"We'll have to try and figure out what it was to recreate it..."

Clara couldn't slip into the same doze that Ashildr did. She glanced down and saw her wife's peaceful face as she slept across her chest but could not take the comfort she needed from it. Ashildr had wrapped her fingers around Clara free hand, so she moved the one from behind her head out to stroke Ashildr's hair gently.

She knew why the sex had been so good. And she hated it.

Those things that her future self had said to her the day she appeared had cursed her. She tried so very hard not to think about them, not to let on what they were, but she always would know. Always. 

And they surfaced in times like this. When they were close. When she couldn't control the ferocity of the love she felt. The way that hands lingered a second longer, the way that kisses were a fraction deeper, the way that eyes soaked up everything they could - it was all in the knowledge of what was to come.

It was all borne of fear.

Eventually, Clara zoned out into something close to sleep, but held on to the brink of consciousness as not to leave her Ash.


	35. It's All Fun and Games Until You Have to Commit a Crime

It never ceased to amaze Clara how a rather large American diner could simply appear out of thin air on some residential street in Britain and nobody noticed. Life would simply continue, although, for all intensive purposes, it had just been flipped around to show that every piece of information humans clung onto was incomplete. People simply continued with their shopping bags and their phone calls and their narrow minded, self-centred belief systems. 

This street was no different. A large playing field crouched next to a block of flats in the suburbs of what looked like it could be London; people milled about, carrying this and that, ignoring each other in the way that Londoners do. A woman on the phone walked right past the two women and the hulking great big building they'd plonked down on the pitch and did not say a word.

Clara glanced around. "Why are we here, do you think?"

Ashildr shrugged. They had been aiming for the south coast of England - both thought a beach trip would do them good - but had apparently missed. She turned and locked the door to the diner. "You know how TARDISes like a bit of trouble," she said. The diner vworped once in response; it almost felt like a chuckle. Ashildr smiled, her hands lingering slightly on the doors affectionately. "Shall we have a bit of a nosey? Chances are, if we're this far off from where we wanted to be, something's gonna happen."

Clara's stomach dropped. Something's gonna happen. Her own words - ones that she had not spoken and yet had heard - echoed in her head. She tried to conceal the flash of fear that shone in her eyes, but had no idea of whether she was successful. 

Clara felt a strong, small hand take her own, and was immediately snapped from her thoughts. Ashildr pulled her off into the estate, nearly yanking her shoulder out of its socket in the process. 

The estate was the kind of gentile, friendly little place you thought of fondly after you had grown up there. Kids pottered about with bikes and footballs and all the paraphernalia of childhood shining in their eyes like the summer sun glinted off chains and reflective coats. Clara felt memories twinge in the back of her mind of kids she had taught lifetimes ago. She missed teaching, sometimes; missed the rewards of having a strong homestead. She squeezed Ashildr's hand. Where would she be without her only constant?

As ever, Ashildr seemed more interested in the back roads than the broad daylight - "Come on, Clara; you know that these are the real city." - and was headed in the general direction of an alley. Clara followed knowingly along behind her, secure in experience that they would get to look at the fancy bits in all good time. Perhaps it was just more what Ashildr was used to - the dark, cobbled streets that stank of piss and despair. She had a point, as well - the slums supported the city.

However, this time, she got more than she bargained for. They both did. In the alley, dimly lit but obviously unkind, was an outline that could never be forgotten. Like a pepper pot, almost; a wide, oval base narrowing to a rounded head and three prongs sticking straight out. 

Upon seeing the Dalek, Clara froze. Her blood ran immediately cold. Ashildr didn't seem to have any reaction at all.

"Do you know what it is?" Ashildr asked in a whisper. Although safe to assume she had run into one at some point in the billions of years she had lived, the experience had obviously not been viscerally terrifying enough to burn it into her long-term memory.

"Very bad news."

Ashildr edged forwards, hand slightly outstretched.

"Don't touch it!" Clara snapped, pulling her wife back and away.  
"It's fine, it's disactivated," she countered, making towards it again. The Dalek's blue eye did, in fact, stare dead and unseeing, lights off, but Clara still didn't trust it. This thing could wreak havoc, slaughter half the population of Earth, in a heartbeat. 

Ashildr brushed a finger against the metal.

The golden Dalekanium begun to glow bright yellow where her skin had touched it. The eyestalk brightened, the lights behind it engaging. The abhorrent creature was coming to life. It twisted its weapons, shuffled back and fore on the spot, and then fixed its single eye on the pair.

"I... Am... Reborn!" it screamed.

"Oh, shit." 

Ashildr was staring at her hand. Her face was a picture of everything you don't want to feel.

Clara grabbed her by that raised hand and legged it. She felt the jolt of Ashildr's resistance behind her, but it was only a moment before both were sprinting full tilt away from the alley and back into the square. 

This was, in a word, a mistake. The Dalek had followed them. There now sat, in this picturesque scene of city life, a psychopath engineered for hatred - armed and willing. Genocide in a heartbeat. 

The sunlight glinted off the metal casing. At first, people laughed, took photos. Until a woman was shot.

She screamed, arms thrown back, skeleton flashing through her flesh. She collapsed, dead, in a second.

And then, panic. Every single person in the square screamed and ran. Not one had an idea where they were going and many were murdered as they fled or crushed in the chaos of the herd.

Clara pulled Ashildr closer towards her. "We need to get it off the street," she said, so quickly she wasn't sure if Ashildr - still rather dazed - had caught her meaning. "I'll act as bait, lure it into the building. Get everyone out. Oh, and Ash?" She leant over and closed the remaining distance between them. She pushed her own lips up against Ashildr's for what felt like a moment but could have been an eternity in the disaster around them. "This isn't your fault. Go."

Ashildr nodded, mind set, before disappearing off of Clara's immediate mental list of "things to worry about." As one can imagine, that list was pretty occupied at that moment. 

Off the street. Gotta get it off the street. 

Most of the square was empty. All of the residents had fled. Clara stood isolated on the tarmac.

"Hey!" she yelled. 

The Dalek spun itself around to stare her dead in the eye. Clara could see it twitch its weapons, thinking about shooting. Best not give it the time to, then, eh? She bolted off across the square, pegging it straight past the Dalek and into the block of flats behind it. The Dalek watched her go, and then started after her. It slid itself across the floor like a really malicious snake.

Clara burst through the doors and tried to lock then shut behind her. Straight ahead - perfect! Stairs! Suck on that, Mr. Slidey.

Should she be enjoying this? 

Clara hurled herself up the first flight of stairs and then looked back down to see if she was, indeed, out of the woods.

Through the windows along the stairs, Clara could see the the Dalek staring at the locked door. It turned its round head to fix its mechanical eye on Clara through the window, and, without breaking eye contact, shot the doors clean off. The explosion sent shockwaves through most of the building.

Maybe she should have seen that coming.

The Dalek slid its way over the debris and into the building. Its eyestalk was still fixed on Clara, although its body faced away from her. Keeping its head angled the way it was, it turned its body underneath it, and was then face on.

Clara's hands rested uneasily on the banister. Her last hope was a flight of stairs.

"Elevate!"

"Oh, piss off! That's just not fair-"

A laser shot flew over Clara's head and destroyed half of the wall behind her - she only just managed to duck in time. Priorities reordered, she began sprinting up the stairs again.

Eventually, she ran out of stairs. The building must have been fifteen stories, and the Dalek was slow, but she still had little time. 

A buzzing from behind her.

Not enough time as she had hoped, then.

Keep it talking. 

"Records show you are an associate of the Doctor!"

"Oh, once upon a time, mate." She turned around to face it.

"Associates of the Doctor are to be exterminated!" 

The fire alarm started to scream. From the flat behind her, a man in a dressing gown and carpet slippers opened the door. His wide eyes took in Clara and the Dalek quickly before he started to run the other way down the corridor. 

Evacuation. Good idea.

From the direction that the man - now screaming - had vanished, Ashildr appeared. She ran right up to Clara, took in the Dalek, grabbed Clara's hand and yanked her off down the corridor.

From behind them as they ran came the whirring of the Dalek along the floor. Neither looked back.

"I've planted a bomb," Ashildr said.

"You made a bomb in five minutes?"

"It's that sort of a day. There's a boiler room at the end of this floor. If we can get it in there, I can set off the bomb and we can kill it."

The Dalek wasn't long behind them. It never was. Clara glanced behind them to see just how far, and it was not far enough for comfort. She darted into the boiler room behind Ashildr. 

Apart from their sawing breaths, the room was silent. They stood sheltered by the tanks. Slicing through the silence, the Dalek entered the room. Through the gaps in the piping, Clara could see it. It shone with hatred, designed for no other purpose than to kill; Clara edged her way along behind the boilers, trying to keep them between that Dalek and herself. Ashildr was but a step behind her. 

Eventually, she ran out of boiler. The door was tantalisingly close, maybe two paces away, but it was open ground and those two paces would be the most dangerous of their lives. The two of them would have to make their way out of the room, shut the door, and run. 

Clara didn't know if sneaking out as to not arouse suspicion or moving as quickly as possible was the best bet. The deciding factor ended up being that she could not hold her nerve. 

She adjusted her feet and prepared the make the dash.

"You ready?" she whispered.

"Right behind you."

Time slowed. Clara's foot caught on a pipe and she tried to jump out from behind the boiler. From the corner of her eye, she saw the Dalek spin its head around, closely followed by its body. As she fell forwards, she only just had time to get her other foot down, and practically jumped the rest of the way out the door. The Dalek faced them now. It shot directly at them. A moment later, it would have hit Ashildr. A moment sooner, it would have hit Clara. As she ran, Ashildr only just managed to duck the laser beam. Clara watched as it soared over her head and promptly blew a hole in the window opposite. She pulled the cast iron door shut behind her and grabbed a chair from the landing to wedge under the handle.

"Bollocks to this," Ashildr panted, throwing her back against the wall on the other side of the doorframe. "How about we retire, eh?"

"This is my retirement. How do you detonate the bomb?"

"Oh, it's on a timer. We have - ooh, two minutes?"

Clara looked at her to try and tell if she was joking or not, and was greatly displeased to see that she was not. After barely a second, Ashildr pushed herself off of the wall and started sprinting down the corridor. It was times like this that not strictly having to breathe was a huge advantage. Although her limbs felt as if she was running in a dream - caught in nets, slow, heavy, not taking her anywhere at all - she still managed to stick right behind Ashildr who, over the years, had grown fiercely quick.

Using the banisters to swing themselves down, they took the stairs close to a flight at a time; their feet crashed on to each landing with almost disorienting bangs that ricocheted up the empty stairwell. 

Bang-bang, bang-bang, bang-bang.

Their crashes, one after the other, echoed the pounding heartbeat that Clara should have had. She was simply grateful that she had something to drown out her panicked thoughts. 

They barely made it to the doors in time. If they hadn't been blown apart, they wouldn't have had time to get through them. Once in the open, Clara and Ashildr kept running, as fast as they could, yelling at those who gazed up at the building in confusion to get back. Some listened, some stared.

Clara was knocked off of her feet by the explosion. Shattering glass punctuated the gutteral screams of the people. Flames licked at the building, dancing out of windows; even from two hundred yard away, Clara could feel the heat on her skin.

Beside her, Ashildr had broken into a relieved laughter. Clara tried very hard not to join her in it, but was eventually overcome.

"This is probably my best case of arson," Ashildr mused. 

Clara frowned deeply. "Excuse me?"

In glancing around, Clara's eye had caught a young boy, barely six. He stood alone on the field. His eyes reflected the flames as they stared, dead, at what was once his home. His mouth hung slightly open. 

The flames dipped slightly. Unnoticed above the wails of the people, a helicopter marked UNIT had descended upon the site.

"Oh, that's about right," Clara muttered to herself. She scrambled to her feet and offered her hand to Ashildr.

\-----  
  
Some hours later, Clara and Ashildr still stood in the square. They leant against the diner, facing each other slightly. Many residents searched the rubble for possessions, and, off to the side, were numerous black body bags - mostly casualties of the Dalek, but two had been pulled from the flames. Some loitered around them, some sobbed over them, and everyone else stayed at least ten feet away. Today would be a tragedy never spoken of. 

"UNIT'll want to speak to us," Ashildr said. Her voice was quiet; she still mourned for those she did not know. She still felt responsible.

"Shall we disappear before they can?"

Ashildr nodded and pushed open the diner door. She didn't even look at Clara as she made her way through to the console room. She eventually collapsed into one of the chairs that hugged the wall.

"You kissed me," she finally said.

"That's not unusual, Ash."

"You've only ever kissed me like that once before."

Clara's hands stilled over the console. "You've been kissed by me like that. I haven't kissed you like that. Not yet."

"Future you. What she said to you, whilst I was out of the room-"  
"Ash."

"It doesn't take a genius to realise that I am to die."

"Yes, but she didn't tell me how. Or when. Ash, any moment I spend with you could be the last." She continued to plug a destination into the console. "So forgive me for kissing you like it's the last time before we run into the path of a Dalek." Her voice dropped. She readjusted her footing, kept her eyes down. "You barely made it out of that room."

Ashildr shook her head, stood from her small chair, and crossed the room to plant a kiss on Clara's temple. "But I did. Where are we off to?" 

"Deep space. I think we both need a nap."


	36. Halloween

Some people in life are met by the tiniest of margins, and, by the same logic, hundreds of people are missed by them. If you had gone to the gym an hour later, you never would have met your best friend; if you had gone down onto the beach instead of staying on the pier, you would have met your future spouse six months earlier. Human lives are hung together with events linked to events linked to events and people linked to people linked to people. An endless row of dominos that fall one after the other, infinitely tiny, changing and shaping the face of the planet. If one miniscule event in a consequative row of millions was even slightly offset, friendships would simply cease to have ever happened. 

And there are other people who seem to be impossible to avoid. Why, you come across them in the year 900, the year 1600, the year 2000, the day the universe ends. They are woven through your course in time, chained to your timeline; so intertwined with you that you could run for all eternity and still find yourself having come back to them. 

And, if you're lucky, they'll appear in your bedroom when you're still half asleep holding something behind their back.

"Happy Halloween!" Clara trilled, slipping herself on into the bedroom.

"It's Halloween?" Ashildr rubbed her eyes of sleep. "I swear it was Halloween three days ago."

"Linear to Earth, I think it's about July," Clara said, bouncing on her toes slightly, "but linear to us, it's Halloween!"

"How are you keeping track?" By this point in the conversation, Ashildr had woken up slightly.

"I've got a calender, although I think it's for 2018. I've been putting a tally mark in each day every time you take an eight hour nap. Yeah, I know it's only accurate every seven years-"

"No, you're getting a week further out every seven years. How long have you been doing this?"

"About a century."

"It's not Halloween, then."

Clara produced a pumkin from behind her. "Then what are we gonna do with this?"

Ashildr snorted and rolled over. Clara placed the pumpkin down on the dresser to her right and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"C'mon," she encouraged. "We can carve pumpkins, watch spooky movies. Eat rock. All those things we never seem to have time for." She let herself collapse until the bed caught her, making the springs ping slightly, and she was laid halfway down the bed with her legs hanging off the end. Ashildr looked down the mattress at her for a moment. 

"I don't see why not." It felt like a surrender. "I'm not getting out of bed yet, though - I'm still quite stiff from the other day."  
The Mire technology wasn't keeping up with the deterioration of Ashildr's joints as well as it might've been, leaving her creakier in the mornings than she otherwise would've been if it were. 

The rest of the day was wiled away in the peace of celebration. When Ashildr beat Clara thoroughly in apple bobbing, she found her face playfully splashed with the cold water. The edges of her hair were still slightly damp when they carved their pumpkins and displayed them on the counter under the twinkling light of the stars of deep space. No external light could penetrate the home cinema, but both immortals had managed to be thoroughly desensitised to anything the horror genre could throw at them - it was simply an excuse to hold and be held.

Despite being a futile grasp for happiness in the inclosing darkness, that day was the brightest of both their lives.  



	37. Revelation

Ashildr was having a hard time adjusting to the idea that her death was on the horizon. She had had a sword hung over her head so many times in her lifetime that it didn't bother her anymore; that and she had come to believe that she was close to indistructable.

Clara, however, was far more aware. She was still very much hotwired to her mortality, and many billions of years younger than her counterpart; her emotions had not been dulled around the edges half as much by the sandpaper of time.

They tried to make the most of what little time both knew they had left; when not being chased around and shot at, the time Clara and Ashildr spent together grew more and more domestic by the day. Ashildr would often settle herself down on a barstool and watch as Clara filtered about making soufflés or pancakes or this that and the other; there was something immensely comforting about the routine of company they'd wordlessly agreed. In fact, in many ways, Ashildr was like a cat; she could sit in the same room and watch without truly being a part of what was going on quite happily.

Clara's eyes always glinted slightly brighter when she laughed. Ashildr could sit in comfortable company with her for hours at a time and simply watch as Clara's eyes sparkled. It was one of the main reasons she tried to make Clara laugh - those beautiful eyes.

Clara stirred her milkshake with a sundae spoon to stop it congealing, completely unaware that she was, perhaps, one of the most beautiful people ever to grace the surface of Earth or any other planet. "Where are we, anyway?"

"Oh, I plonked us down in the middle of the desert. I wanted to see the sun."

"Fair enough," Clara resigned, leaning back against the far counter on her elbows. "I do miss this one particular... Fission reactor..."

"Fusion."

"Is there a difference?"

"If the sun were a fission reactor, we'd know about it. Or, we wouldn't, because we'd be vaporised. We'd be dust. _Radiation_."

Despite being in the middle of nowhere, the door could be heard to slide open with a hiss of the draft excluder at scraping across the linoleum. Clara glanced at Ashildr, who shrugged - they may as well serve whoever it was, seeing as they were the only place for clean water within a radius of tens of miles.

The man who stood at the door, however, was not an unfamiliar face. A young adult, barely pushing twenty five, his hands lived in the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. He frowned at his shoes. When he finally looked up, his eyes were sunken into his skull, nearly as deeply etched as the lines around them; his entire expression was twisted into that of a sour distrust and an anger that had slipped to the back of his mind and simmered there.

Ashildr shot ramrod straight in her chair. Her knuckles whitened as she choked her milkshake glass half to shattering. Clara lifted her elbows from the counter behind her.

This Jeremiah was older than the child they'd seen on the road, and so much less violent than any other they'd come across. His rage still sat with him, evident behind his eyes, but most of what he carried in his heart was pain.

"Can I help you, sir?" Clara asked gingerly.

He looked up from the floor and fixed Clara's eyes. Wordlessly, he moved towards them. Ashildr was frozen to her stool. Clara shifted her weight from foot to foot. Ashildr could feel her panic bubbling beneath and tried not to absorb it. Instead, she followed Clara's darting eyes, sizing up the possible exits should they have to run.

This guy meant trouble. This guy always meant _fucking_ trouble. He moved slowly over to the bar and sat a few seats down from Ashildr. "No," he said. "There's nothing you can do for me." He stared directly forward from his dead eyes. They reminded Ashildr of a shark's.

The silence lengthened.

"I thought you were my own personal torment," he finally said. "I searched for you to ensure that my fragmented mind had not churned out someone to blame for the monstrosities I endured as a child." A sardonic smile pulled at the edge of one side of his mouth. "You don't see your parents' corpses and come out okay." He spat his final words; his entire demeanour changed, snapping from reculuseive to outwardly violent in one exaggerated grasp. His fists balled on the counter. "You think you're so just - you act as if you're doing God's work, when, in reality, all you do is slaughter." He unclenched his fists and straightened his fingers against the plastic of the counter. "I thought you were my own personal demons, forged specifically for my nightmares. Instead, you were mere time travellers." That same sardonic smile. The rise and fall of a calm chest like he hadn't just uprooted entirely an otherwise pleasant day. "I may be the monster, but you're the Frankensteins. You made me."

"How did you find us?" Ashildr demanded through gritted teeth.

"As I said, I've been following you for a while." With that, he stood from his stool, looked the silent Clara up and down once, and left. In the silence that followed his departure, the very air seemed to crackle around them.

"The kid," Clara voiced in a terrified whisper. "They pulled two bodies out of that building we had to blow up. The Dalek. We killed his parents." Clara turned herself around and leaned against the far counter on the palms of her hands.

Ashildr jumped out of her stool and started to pace. "What are we gonna do?" she breathed. "I don't know if there's anything we can."

"Doesn't it make sense now, Ash? Can't you see it?"

Ashildr stopped pacing abruptly. It was almost as if the very stars inside of her that pushed her forward had collapsed into black holes - no longer sources of energy, but actively zapping it. Her knees gave out from underneath her; she barely made it back to her stool.

"No wonder he was coming after us. Christ. _Christ_."

Ashildr felt her heart sink inches deeper in her chest.

Guilt is a wonderless thing.

Eternity was waning.


	38. Motions of Life

TW - blood, knives, violence

Autumn had always been Ashildr's favourite season, for as far back as she could remember - and probably before that, too. She adored the way the golden leaves would be caught by the wind and move in such a way they could almost be alive. That, and for a long time, she was sick of people. Spanning thousands of years, she saw humanity make the same mistakes over and over again; it felt like watching a bee bump against the glass of a window repetitively when the opening was but six inches to the left. She grew reclusive. Would hide in the days, and only ever emerge at night. One of the mindsets she never managed to shift was that that she was a creature of the night - everyday, when the sun sank behind the horizon and the sky turned a tortured blue, she would tell herself that every second after was hers. In many ways, in the emptiness of the streets, it was. In the silence of the night, under the waning light and the clouds tinged orange by the final few flames of the dying sun, she was properly alive. And for those few moments before the stars lit the sky with their pinpricks of light, she could breathe air clean of desperation, and prepare for the depravity of the day she would wake to tomorrow.

Every so often, Clara and Ashildr would skip ahead to an autumn of a year with low air pollution and breathe in the crisp air; Ashildr would watch as the sky as the evening dwindled into the deep black of space unlit, and Clara would watch Ashildr's face flash with the memories that played in her mind as if she was watching someone else.

Then, of course, they would usher themselves back to the diner; women are not paid well for staying out late at night, as strong as the pull that still sat over Ashildr's heart was - on truly beautiful evenings, they would hop an hour around the world and watch the sun set again. That's the thing with time travel: summer never has to end, and the sun never has to set. It never matters how dark things get, how thick the clouds are, or how deep the nuclear winter - the sun is always right behind the clouds, and all one ever has to do is endure the cold until it returns. 

The sky was still a burnt orange in places as Ashildr deliberately dragged her feet through the leaves. Forested areas were a treat at this time of year as the dead leaves fell and danced their last lease of life before settling on the mud. The diner had been parked (rather expertly, Clara would say, although it was average at best) on the outskirts of some town they'd landed near. The TARDIS itself had been uneasy going to the place they had; she had materialised in a very similar way to that which one pulls a thorn - like what is to be done needs to be, but causes great pain.

Eventually, the night set in, and, as tempted as Ashildr was to sprawl herself out across the leaves, to hold her wife to her side and point out the constellations through the grasping fingers of the shedding trees, Clara was growing anxious. Unspoken agreement led them back to the mercifully-close diner, which was, unfortunately, not unattended.

A deeper darkness clung to the glass wall and blocked the door. Ashildr recognised the shape immediately, so haunted had her dreams been by it.

Jeremiah.

Before she could breathe a word, the shadow dislodged itself and made directly for her. Her mind couldn't keep up with what was going on, and, the next thing she knew, Ashildr was out cold.

-

When consciousness finally found its way through the chloroform, control of the situation had passed on. Ashildr pulled her eyes open to find her wrists and ankles duct taped to the arms and legs of a wooden chair. She immediately balled her fists as tried to wriggle her arms free, but the tape held fast. Her feet only just scraped the floor; she couldn't reach to undo her plastic shackles and couldn't stand without doing so. Looks like she was staying here, then. 

"Hey, sleepy head," Clara whispered from beside her.

For the first time, Ashildr took in her surroundings. Clara sat on a chair similar to her own and just out of reach, also taped by the wrists and ankles. A bruise the size of an egg was forming just above her left eye. 

The room they sat in was the most dank and acrid one could ever have the misfortune of coming across. A basement, probably, the four walls pressed in on the dark emptiness contained within. A strip of light filtered down through the hole carved in the top of one wall to light a square section of the concrete floor. At the far end, barely distinguishable through the darkness, a carpenter's bench sat pushed against the wall. Behind it rose a series of wooden planks; hung on hooks protruding from these planks was a consort of nasty looking instruments such as hammers and chisels - the suspicious stains led Ashildr to believe they were not being used for their intended purpose. If she craned her neck around, she could see the steel door behind her.

"How long was I out?" Ashildr asked, still twisting her wrists around.

"About three hours longer than me." She smiled, following Ashildr's eyes to the welt forming on her forehead. "Long enough for me to piss him off."

Ashildr couldn't share Clara's amusement. Although situations such as this were not entirely uncommon for the two, Jeremiah's mere participation always seemed to emancipate how dire they were; he was more ruthless than any other they had had to deal with over the many, many years. As far as she could see it, a man who meant them very serious harm (for reasons she could empathise with, if not agree) had them tied up in his murder dungeon and had already given her wife a serious blow to the skull. Whether they liked it or not, the fucker meant buisness. 

Clara leaned forward and onto her feet. She was still tied to the chair and subsequently hunched over, but managed to shuffle herself closer to Ashildr. She then plonked her chair back down again - this time close enough to wrap her fingers around Ashildr's. 

"Hey," she said. "We don't have to be alone."

Behind them, the door scraped open. The screech of the metal against the concrete floor went straight through Ashildr and forced a judder right down her spine. When Clara's hand fell from Ashildr's, she found herself reaching for it again. She couldn't be alone.

Jeremiah walked around the back of the chairs slowly. He then stood in the square of light that fell in through the window, illuminating all his hatred for both to see.

His eyes were sunken further into his skull than ever, yet still shone black with their trademark sadism. His brow stuck out half an inch from his face. His arms were criss-crossed with large, pink scars from knife slashes, made obvious by the way he folded them over his chest. The boots he wore were heavy, as if for physical labour, yet still disappeared under his trousers. Hanging from the right side of his belt was the knife he had carried on the train; still as fierce out of view as it could have ever been on the table. 

After a moment, he chuckled to himself once and turned on his heel. The hard rubber soles of his boots thumped as he made his way to the array of tools behind him, eventually deciding on a rubber mallet. He weighed it in his hand by the end of the handle briefly before letting the wood slip through his massive, square fingers and letting it rest on the skin between his thumb and pointer finger. He then pulled a chair up with his free hand and sat himself down on it.

With the man that had haunted and chased them for so long now sat merely six feet away, Ashildr's pulse started to race. Her head started to swim. Thoughts darted past her so quickly she was unsure if any of them even made sense - although she could take a good guess that they didn't. The only thing grounding her to the final threads of the real world was the periodic, gentle squeeze of Clara's fingers around her own.

We can find a way out of this, Clara was saying. Just like we always do. 

As comforting as the gesture was, it couldn't chase away the fear that had settled into Ashildr's bones. The deep-seated dread that had plagued her since this man appeared in a torn up battlefield and put a bullet in her kidney. It had grown, of course; worsened over the time she had let it linger. The gnawing ache of fear that had cursed her and turned her stomach into a churned mess of anxiety. And now, trapped in a basement with the sounds bouncing around and the square light growing ever smaller with the setting sun, those fears inflated until they pressed against the concrete walls. Suffocating. Mocking. Emptying. 

"You two deserve everything that is coming to you," Jeremiah drawled. 

"You'd think that, wouldn't you, mate?" Clara muttered back.

Jeremiah held the mallet up to the light and smiled calmly to himself. 

Ashildr cocked her head to him, all righteous in evil, and then caught Clara's eye. "He's gone all sullen. I think you hurt his feelings."

"That reminds me," Clara stuck on, "do you remember that, uh, woman, from that shop in Donegal?"

"The one with the horrendous cardigan and the inability to empathise?"

"Yeah!" 

They were both laughing. The mere memories of the roaring idiocy they got up to in their time together was almost enough to chase away the fear.

Ashildr tried to speak through the chuckles breaking from her throat. "She was-"

Jeremiah had tired of the inconsequential babble from his prisoners. He stood, brought his arm back to swing it round and landed the mallet directly on Ashildr's jaw.

She felt her bones crunch. She spat blood out, spraying the floor ahead and part of Jeremiah's shoe. She cracked her jaw back into place. "Somebody wasn't hugged enough as a child."

Clara's face contorted with unfiltered rage. "If you touch her again I will slowly _take you apart_! God help me, I will make you a pile of _bones and dust_."

Jeremiah shifted the mallet in his hand. He took Ashildr's jaw roughly in his free hand and twisted her neck around to examine the bruise that was already forming. He looked somewhat pleased with himself. "See that?" he asked Ashildr. "The true monster shines through. That is what you are." He dropped Ashildr's jaw almost as harshly as he'd taken ahold and headed back towards the bench. He placed the mallet back on its peg and, this time, it was his trusty seventeen inch knife he drew from the sheath against his thigh. He angled the point at Clara and waggled it slightly. He then laughed to himself and sunk back into the chair, elbows on his knees, scowl over his sunken eyes.

Clara was still glaring.

They remained locked in stand-off for more frantic heartbeats than Ashildr could count.

Jeremiah then stood again, held the knife against Ashildr's throat for a moment that lasted wholly too long, and then spun it around his finger and sheathed it. He took his seat wordlessly and stayed that way. 

The hours passed in terse discomfort.

"You should sleep," Clara suggested when even the light from the moon had begun to fade. She stretched out her fingers to take Ashildr's again.

"How could I sleep?" 

The grey dawn seeped in through the tiny window above them.

"What happened to that sweet young boy, Jeremiah?" Clara spoke directly to him now. His hands stilled at the bench. His shoulders slumped slightly before righting themselves into his signature arrogance. "What happened to you was inexcusable, but you could have fought for him. For that innocence."

"I gave up waiting for somebody else to save me." 

A short silence.

"It's time you did the same."


	39. Motions of Death

**TW -** major character death, blood, injury detail, violence

Trauma spits out two very distinct types of people. The one who swears that they will be alone in their pain; the one shields all others they meet from it with the only weapon they can find: kindness. The one who would sacrifice themselves for even the slightest extension of another's innocence. The one who would suffer for eternity to protect someone who's name they do not even know.

And then there is the sadist. The one who has been so shredded that they wish only to watch the world burn; the one who cannot see past their own pain and tire of the incessant chatter of those unblinded, so they burn so bright everyone around them is rendered sightless, too.

Jeremiah was a supernova, and he wasn't set on keeping that to himself.

Even if she had been counting in the first place, Clara had lost track of the days. The rise and setting of the sun felt erratic in these such dungeons of despair, and their anti-benevolent master exactly wasn't keeping mealtimes regular. She really had no way of telling; the bruises on Ashildr's jaw had begun to fade to a yellow, though - at least they weren't the raging purple they had been when they were fresh. They were less obvious - a mercy as Clara hated looking at them.

Visits from their overlord were neither anticipated nor appreciated, but Clara supposed that was the point. This _was_ torture. When Jeremiah did make himself present, he would move the chairs that had mysteriously shuffled towards one another apart, sit and stare for a moment of time, almost as if he were planning, and then grab some merciless tool and leave Ashildr bleeding. On that particular day, it had been his very own fist; when Ash had made a snide comment regarding his socks (which were hideous, naturally - Ashildr wasn't rude for nothing), she'd found herself punched square in the mouth. Her lip had split open and blood dribbled pathetically down her chin. Clara's hands had clenched themselves into fists against the wood of the armrests as the anger which bubbled right below the surface made itself rudely apparent. Ashildr hadn't been put off, however, her spirit unquenchable as ever; she had spat at him, and managed to catch him square on the cheek. The sadist froze, raised his eyebrows and tilted his head, wiped off the spit off his face and made his way to the back of the room to where all his instruments sat. When all he brought back was a cloth, Ashildr put two and sinister two together, but could not avoid the chloroform from her shackles: it didn't take long for her to stop struggling.

At least, when she was unconscious, she wasn't aware of what was happening to her. At least she could wrangle the tiniest repose. Clara watched her as her head lulled to one side.

Jeremiah looked on with a face painted in astonishment. "How can two such monsters be so in love with one another?"

Clara frowned slightly but did not take her eyes from Ashildr. Could this man have an appreciation of love?

"It's _disgusting,_ " he added.

Yeah, that was more consistent with his character.

"And what about you, Jeremiah?" Clara's retort was empty, half-hearted; with Ashildr unconscious, her mettle faded until it was a distant memory. All that was left was the feeling of watching the train you were meant to catch pull from the station without you on it. The pressing persecution of the walls was unbearable without her. "Is there anything left behind that anger, or did you scoop your heart out so it could all fit?" Still, she did not lift her eyes from Ashildr's face. In the tranquility of her still quiet, it could almost be believed that she was asleep; maybe, in all the fires of hell that blazed around them, she had found some peace. Even if just for a convoluted while.

Jeremiah didn't respond to Clara's question. Instead, he took Clara's chair by the back, pulled her three feet further away from her now unconscious wife, and angled her straight on. He then disappeared upstairs - when the metal door scraped across the floor, light flooded into the cramped space. Clara closed her eyes. In clarity - in _light_ \- she could see most of the basement. The first few times, it had been a breath of air - a merciful break from the unknowing of the very surroundings they were forced into calling home.

However long they had been down there, be it an hour or a month - it was impossible to tell - the floor had become almost coated with blood. Every day, Ashildr would be pushed to the point of bleeding. There were no pools, thank God - streaks, splatters, uncomfortable fingerprints from when her chair had been shoved over and her nose cracked against the concrete, yes, but no pools. The mere sight of it and the feelings of hopeless futility that they caused, though, were enough to drive Clara to emotions she had hoped never to feel again.

When Jeremiah arrived again, torturously soon, he held a bag of fluid under his arm and a plastic tube between his teeth - in both his hands was a metal pole that branched out into feet at one end and hooks at the other. What the hell did he need with an intravenous drip?

The bastard even had the audacity to hum to himself as he set it up. Draping the bag over the hooks, attaching the plastic tube to the cap. He then crudely stuck a cannula into the inside of Ashildr's elbow, not cleaning the area beforehand or even stopping to think about doing it close to properly.

"You get to watch her die." The concept seemed to bring him a joy. His lifelong goal of brutalising a woman realised before him.

"What the hell do you mean?" One man's dream is another man's hellish nightmare, as they say. All the events of the past and the futures she hadn't lived falling into a sickening puzzle with the image revealing an anguished, arduous death witnessed by the only other soul to understand. "You can't." It was meant to be a scream. It was a whisper. "For god's sake, you bastard, you can't."

Jeremiah flashed a disgusting smile. Broke his teeth out and all. His fingers rapped against the clear liquid in the bag. "Cyanide." From his pocket, he withdrew a small, cylindrical tube containing what looked like pink salts and capped at the end, popped off the lid, and wafted it underneath Ashildr's nose.

She jolted awake. Literally, jolted - the chair legs scarped harshly against the ground. She shook her head out and groaned.

"You know, if you asked nicely, I could just take a quick _nap_ and you wouldn't have to keep messing me around with chloroform and smelling salts." Ashildr took in the IV. "Right. What's all this, then?" She directed towards Clara, "Has he finally noticed my chronic dehydration?"

Although she tried to swallow, the lump Clara's throat wouldn't let her.

Jeremiah folded his arms across his chest. "Go on," he said. "Tell her what it is."

Words wouldn't formulate. Clara couldn't reach them.

Jeremiah snorted.

-

It took days, but, eventually, Ashildr started to weaken. Perhaps it was a combination of her stubborn alien technology, her vast strength, and a very small dose of poison, but dying seemed to take her ages - both of their pain, prolonged. It felt like watching a car crash unfold in slow motion from the other side of the road. There was nothing either could do.

Jeremiah had set up cameras with a live feed to upstairs, so even if Clara had managed to wrangle herself free of the sellotape shackles she wouldn't have been able to do anything worthwhile before she was put under awesome scrutiny herself.  
Ashildr tried so hard to not show any weakness. As she grew paler, though, it became difficult to hide. She couldn't stay awake for any length of time. When she _was_ alert, she was barely there; her reactions were sluggish, her movements subdued. Even speaking would drain her.

Both knew she was dying. Neither mentioned it. They simply sat in a silent feedback loop of desperation. The whole basement mocked them. There were no straws left to grasp. This was it.

Jeremiah had made himself scarce. Perhaps he had realised that Clara was being by no means hyperbolic when she said she would turn him inside out for the pleasure of his own psychopathic gentry.

He did appear one final time, throwing a cascade of light into the room as he pushed open the heavy door. He took Ashildr's vitals, smiled, and removed the drip.

Clara watched almost surgically. A chance of survival? Dare she _hope_?

He then removed a letter opener from his pocket - which Clara recoiled from extinctivly - and slipped the tape bounds from Clara's wrists and ankles, and then Ashildr's. So dillapetated, Ashildr nearly fell straight onto the floor - Clara only just managed to catch her and guide her down instead of hearing her nose crunch. Again.

Now she was in her arms, Clara could tell how weak Ashildr truly was. She shivered, her muscles had wasted to almost nothing, and she recoiled from movement as if her whole body had cramped.  
"Why let us go?" Why after he'd made their life hell for so many cycles of the moon she'd almost forgotten how to walk?

" _She_ 's not going anywhere." Jeremiah kicked Ashildr in the side with his boot. She whimpered and fell closer against Clara. "And you're not the type for desertion." Jeremiah's dead eyes bore into Clara's; they were like drills digging down to the very pits of hell she had let fester in her mind.

He pulled the door shut behind him when he left, and the room was cast into glum dimness once again.

Clara slipped her arm around the back of Ashildr's head and propped her up against her knee. With her free hand, Clara took Ashildr's pulse from under her chin and then rested her hand against her chest. Against the mewed persuasions not to from Clara, Ashildr began to talk.

"We saw this coming," she said. "We saw this coming a mile off. Death encompasses all... Planets, gods, stars." She was struggling for breath now. "But being alive is so much more powerful... And you cannot have one without the other. Clara-" She fumbled to take Clara's hand, the effort driving her to lightheadedness. Clara could see her eyes unfocuss. "Don't take vengeance. Violence is the breeding ground for violence. I doubt his mates would be too happy about him turning up dead. The company he keeps is less than desirable, I bet my pension..."

"Do you have a pension?"

A weak laugh. A laugh the shadow of what it used to be. What it should have been. "Hundreds."

The light behind her eyes was fading. Clara held her hand to Ashildr's cheek. She felt the smile spread beneath her fingers.

"Me and you," Ashildr gasped. "Time and space. And ever so much of both. The arms of a lover was always supposed to be the best place to..."

She trailed off. Her eyes were closed.

"Hey, Ash, hey, hey."

"Clara..."

Ashildr's voice was barely more than a whisper. "Remember, now," she said, now barely more than a husk, "start a Viking metal band in my honour." That same weak smile. It lasted mere seconds before slipping off lf her pale face. It never came back.

Then, she stopped breathing. The jagged, shallow rise and fall of her chest simply stopped.

Clara fumbled for a moment. She called her Ash's name, tried to rouse her, tried to move her.

Screams echoed off of the close walls. It took Clara a moment to realise that they were hers.

Clara held Ashildr over her lap until her screams broke into disillusioned sobs. Until her brain pounded against her skull. Until her heart had disintegrated from shards to dust that crunched against the concrete floor. For the horrifying moments between where her heartbeats should have been - the moments where she simply listened to Ashildr's pulse to compensate - the black was more dense than it had ever been in five million years.

Eventually, Clara lost the motivation to scream. Instead, she lay curled around Ashildr's lifeless body on the hard floor and stared into the dark with unfocussed eyes. Her mind was blank; not a single thought crossed her, and yet so many flew past she couldn't tie one down to see what it was. All the room seemed to do was swim.

A murky figure crossed her gaze. The words it spoke barely registered; they sounded as if they were drifting through a wall.

"I had to live with the pain. Now, so do you."

Clara couldn't remember the transit. There simply came a time when the pain from the numbness in her legs outweighed the pain that ripped through her chest and forced her to move. One moment she was hauling herself to her feet, and the next she had collapsed again on the linoleum floor; the diner that once upon a time brought such joy now felt like a tomb.

Her voice came out in rasps first, and then whispers. "I couldn't leave you there... C'mon, Ash, please... Wake up..." Clara held Ashildr's hand, now cold, and felt herself weep.

She stared at Ashildr for hours, waiting for her to take a breath.

But she never did.


	40. And So the Dominos Fall

Clara never quite intended to fall in love. In the way that it so often does go, she simply had. One day, Ashildr had returned from a trip out with a bleeding gash above the eyebrow, and the mere sight of it set Clara off. She was overcome with the urge to hold Ashildr to her chest and destroy all that had caused her harm. That day, they had sat in the diner with gauze and rubbing alcohol. Clara had cleaned and dressed the wound, trying very hard not to catch the eyes that gazed steadily into hers. 

The days you're in love are not the hardest, no; those days are the sweetest. Those are the days when the kiss of the pink sky reflects the kiss on your cheek that lulls you to sleep. Those are the days of peace - the days when you could feel your pulse quicken at a thought and your mind wanders to them at any time of day. Those are the days when their face is plastered across the sky. The days when God himself could appear to you as an apparition and you would dare to contradict him.

The hardest days are before love - when they plague you but you cannot figure why - and after. The hole they leave behind.

Clara had never been so corroded. She was drowning in the misery that taints joy in the dark times that follow. Her life became a constant battle between integrity and collapse. In the days, she chose integrity; she continued to move as much as she could with Ashildr's final arrangements. Taking her to where she'd want to be - the sea her village fished in all those years ago. Finding her a longboat and setting her off to sea with flames lapping at her heart and the Ulfbert she so treasured in life. She had truly never let go of Valhalla. But she felt nothing. The hands that dressed Ashildr were not her own. The movements that set her boat to sail were not hers. The tears that fell on the water as it numbed her legs were not hers. 

In the nights, she chose collapse. No room in the TARDIS was free of reminders of Ashildr. She couldn't sleep, even if she wanted to; she couldn't stay in any one room j without a thousand visions of Ashildr flashing through her head. She would simply pace the corridors and wait until the sun outside rose again. She hadn't been able to move the diner from where she'd landed in the hills up from the village. 

It was getting to the point where she wasn't able to cope. Humans have low-level telepathic abilities which can be exacerbated by long-term exposure to alien technology; due to the strength of their bond and the millennia spent in a TARDIS, Clara and Ashildr had become mentally linked, and a psychic imprint of her Ash lingered in Clara's mind. She was just there, right behind her, and just out of reach. 

This was the most divine form of torture. Nothing Jeremiah could have imagined for them could contest this.

It may have been years before Clara eventually plugged coordinates into the console of the diner. All she could think was that the smog wasn't lifting, and that the pain she felt was more than anything she had ever experienced. She was done.

Gallifery. The long way round. She'd finally run out of corridor.

They still weren't her actions. Still weren't her legs that walked her through the halls of an unfamiliar planet at the end of time. Still weren't her ears which picked up the garbled messes of speech. She was underwater. Drowning. Done.

Even though it went against everything inside her that had not yet been corroded was screaming - although there was not much left - she took the step back into the blindingly white light. Beyond that light was Ashildr, alive and well, and maybe Clara's final heartbeat could be spent with her, as all the lifetime of the universe could never have been enough.


End file.
